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

Welcome to Episode 78 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 covering an area of life that is normally not considered to be “part of the gospel.” At least according to modern pastors and theologians, who just love to separate the world and the life and society of man into two areas: “this is the gospel,” and “this is not the gospel.” Of course, there is a reason for their dividing the world into “gospel” and “not gospel,” and it is the good old motive of power and power-mongering. But we will leave that to another episode. Suffice to say here, from the position of the Bible – and from the position of Christian Reconstruction – there is nothing that is outside the scope of the Gospel. All of life is covenantal, which means, all of life is ethical-judicial. All of life is subject to issues of good and evil, and therefore all of life falls under the judgment of God. Christ started his Great Commission with the words, “All authority has been given to Me,” and charged the disciples to teach the nations all He has commanded them. And all His commandments are given in the whole Bible, and they cover every aspect, and every area of life. And the description of the Gospel in 1 Cor. 15 ends with all things being subjected to Him. And “all things” means “all things,” not just the few religious topics pastors and theologians like to babble about.

Including the economy. The economy of a nation is also subject to the Gospel and is part of the Gospel; it is part of that all that He has commanded us. Economic decisions – whether individual or corporate or national – are ethical, they are either good or evil, and they are therefore subject to the Law of God. And, mark this, individuals and nations are either blessed or cursed for their economic decisions, according to whether the decisions were good or evil. Issues like forms of property, wages and profits, investments and consumption, economic growth, money, money supply, and banking, stock markets, government interference, taxes and regulations, government control over the job market, etc., are part of that all authority given to Christ. To exclude these from our Biblical, Gospel-centered analysis of our society today will mean to truncate the Gospel and to limit the power and authority of Jesus Christ in the world today; and with this, to allow areas of free reign for idols and false ideologies – and injustice. These need to be addressed from a Biblical, covenantal perspective, and we as Christians need to call for repentance and redemption in all these areas just like we call for repentance and redemption in the personal life of men. (Besides, what does personal repentance of an economist, or a businessman, or a government employee look like in his professional endeavors?)

What I want to talk about this week is GDP growth and trade wars. I was asked to cover this issue some time ago, but I didn’t get to it until now, and in fact, now is a very good time given the news of the last several weeks. First, of course, we have the great news of two quarters of high – and rather unexpected – GDP growth: 4.1% for the second quarter of 2018, and 3.5% for the third quarter of 2018. (Keep in mind that this is extrapolated for a whole year, it is not for the specific quarter. Thus, the second quarter’s real growth is a little over 1%, and the third quarter’s is a little less then 0.9%.) Now, Donald Trump is using this for his self-propaganda, claiming that there has never been growth above 2% with the previous administration. That is not true. Obama had three quarters better than that: 4.7% in the 4th quarter of 2011, and then 5.1% and 4.9% in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2014, two consecutive quarters of extraordinarily high GDP growth. (Again, remember, this is all extrapolated, not absolute.) Obama also had six quarters of above 3% growth, and they were quite consistently spread. On real annual basis, out of 8 years in office, Obama had 4 years of above 2% growth, 3 years of about 1.6% growth, and one year of negative growth, -2.8%, but that was his first year, arguably a left over from the previous administration. I say this not as some sort of eulogy for Obama or a defense of him; just keep it in mind before you get swayed by the current propaganda coming from the White House. Figures don’t lie, but don’t let liars figure it for you.

This GDP growth coincided with another economic news, namely, Trump’s trade war against China, Canada, the European Union, and pretty much the whole world, in fact, over tariffs, and specifically over tariffs on steel. From previous episodes of Axe to the Root, you know my view on these tariffs: they are nothing more than another example of corruption, boosting the profits of crony capitalists not by increasing productivity, but by robbing the public. Domestic steel producers in the US held 75% of the market anyway; the only thing they did after the tariffs were introduced was to increase their prices and make their customers pay more. This increased cost for their customers created problems for companies who are traditional exporters – who now lost their export base – and for domestic companies that sell to the domestic market, so now the US consumers will have to pay higher prices. It also made US companies buy lots of inventory from China in anticipation of the tariffs, which diverted resources from investing in productivity. (More about this later.) In addition, China declared their own tariffs in response, which made a number of American businesses lose their export contracts – especially agricultural producers in the Midwest. Which, of course, created better opportunities for agricultural producers in Mexico and Brazil, who are now having a heck of a year moving into markets lost by American agricultural producers. To which the Trump administration responded with declaring a $12 billion bailout for farmers – which, however, is absolutely insufficient to cover the long-term cost of lost markets. (And in the trade with agricultural products, it sometimes takes decades to get established in the market – ask the Texas ranchers about.) There are also certain conditions to the bailout which leave the smaller producers out. Not to mention the irony that, for example, the two largest pork-producers in the country that qualify for the bailouts – Smithfield Foods and JBS – are Chinese and Brazilian-owned, respectively. And they are not the only foreign-owned firms that would profit from the bailout – under the rules of the $1.2 billion initial purchase of foods, there is no way to tell inventories bought from Mexican or Canadian farmers from those bought from US farmers. The confusion the Trump administration created is so perfect that it is worthy of being mentioned in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Previous presidents have also had their moments, but we haven’t seen such ineptness and chaos since Jimmy Carter.

Then there is the curious case of the actions of the Chinese businesses and government. The Chinese government did put up an air of retaliating against Trump’s tariffs with their own tariffs. Now, American companies responded to the tariffs with increased imports before the tariffs hit, to stock their inventories with cheaper steel and other materials. But there was no corresponding action on the Chinese side: at least not as active as expected. Chinese importers did not rush to buy US goods in anticipation of the increased Chinese tariffs. It was almost as if the Chinese businesses were told by their government to hold on until second notice. That second notice came just this last week: the Chinese government announced that they would lower the tariffs for all imports by 20-30%. On the surface, it looks like the Chinese government has surrendered and has done Trump’s bidding to lower their tariffs. In reality, however, a few important details paint a different picture. First, the Chinese did it only after American exporters lost their markets in China, and after American importers rushed to buy to stock up their inventories. This both opened the Chinese market for non-US producers and gave the Chinese economy a significant short-term financial injection. Second, the lowered tariffs apply to all imports, and not only to those from the US. Which means, the Chinese government practically told the whole world that they have an open door to complete against American producers on Chinese soil. And, third, the lower tariffs come at a time when the Chinese government is in the process of further de-regulating its manufacturing. Lower costs plus lower regulation will make it even more attractive for American companies to outsource to China; the resulting prices will be low enough to cancel the effect of the US tariffs, and so the Chinese will continue having good positions on the US markets. In short, the Chinese government played the game of, “We will do what you want us to do, technically, but we will do it in a way that will hurt you more than it hurts us.”

Or, to make it even clearer, the Chinese government seems to have learned the lesson of the last 150 years of European history: The best way to win a trade war is to lose it. Or, even better, to lose it at the right moment, when your opponent is worked up to fight it to the end. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is operating on obsolete feudal ideologies of two centuries ago.

And to all this we need to add a last but very important element of the picture: the financial markets. I know, quite a few Christians eye the stock market with suspicion: is it real, and does it really have anything to do with the economy? I am not going to cover this issue here. But there is a curious thing happening there: starting in January this year, the stock market has been in constant turmoil, after experiencing a relatively stable growth for several years. The Dow Jones almost hit 27,000 in January this year, and then collapsed by over 10%. It tried again in September, and collapsed again. However you want to interpret this, one thing is sure: investors are running from investments and are liquidating their inventories the moment the prices go above certain level. As a stock market specialist said recently, “Stocks do not lie. They reveal people’s psychology.” Something is happening, and it is not good.

But there is still the objection: no matter what we say about the Trump administration, the GDP has been rising by more than 3.5% on an annual basis for two consecutive quarters. How do you explain that? And what does it mean that the GDP is growing by so much? And what we supposed to make of the stock market signals? And how are we supposed to understand all this within a covenantal frame of interpretation? Let’s look at it.

What is GDP, or Gross Domestic Product?

GDP is the aggregate market value of all goods and services produced in certain territory over the course of a certain period, usually a year. Remember Robinson Crusoe from our earlier episode of Axe to the Root titled “The Nature of Economic Growth.” The amount of berries Robinson gathers every day is his GDP for the day. (Given that Robinson doesn’t import any value from other places, and all of this value is produced by him.) If Robinson spends half of the day making a pole and the other half gathering berries, then his GDP will be the sum of the work put in the pole plus the amount of berries he gathered for half day. If we move to more realistic examples, the things get a little bit more complicated. If you are a shoemaker, and you are making 500 pairs of shoes a year, your annual GDP will be the market value of these shoes, but discounted by the cost of the materials you bought from other people. Those other materials were already existing value, so your GDP will be only the value you created above the sum of the value you “imported.” A nation’s GDP, then, will equal the market value of the final goods and services provided, not including intermediary or imported materials and services. It is what total value we as a nation produce over one year. It will include all the consumer goods we produce. It will also include all the services we produce. It will include all the investments in machinery and organization of production that increase productivity per capita. It will include all the scientific and technological research and discoveries. It will include entertainment and art. It will include all the government services – although, admittedly, given that all these services can be provided at much lower prices and higher quality at the free market, they will be highly overrated in calculating the GDP. It will, however, exclude all the imports, and it will exclude all the intermediate materials used to produce final goods. And it will exclude financial investments: stocks and bonds are only transfer of deeds, not production, and the money paid for stocks count as “product” only when the company uses it to make investments.

There are several ways of calculating GDP, and all of them should lead to the same figures, except that there are always errors in calculation. I will omit mentioning all of them, and I will only focus on the simplest – and according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the most reliable – methodology. It is called the Expenditure Approach, and it takes in account the final uses of all goods and services. The formula is this:

GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government spending + Export – Import

It should be quite clear: our total product is equal to what we spend on consumer goods plus what companies spend on investment in productivity plus what the government spends (someone must produce it for the government to buy it), plus what people abroad spend on our goods (exports), and from all this, we need to subtract what we spend on other nations’ imports (because they were not produced here in the US).

What is GDP good for, what does it reveal and what doesn’t it reveal? And is it reliable as an economic indicator? It is reliable, as far as its purpose goes. But it is also limited, and often does not give the information people think it does. For one, it does reveal the total production of a territory over a certain period. When we say that the GDP of the industrial area Beaumont-Greater Houston-Corpus Christi equals that of Russia, that speaks volumes about the economy of Russia (140 million population) vs. the economy of South East Texas (10 million population). When we take the product and divide it by the population, we can calculate the mean productivity of an area; which goes under the name “GDP per capita.” Although, our number may differ from the real productivity, given that we don’t know how many hours of productive work has the average worker worked. (A modern, highly productive plant may have been idle for most of the year and will show low productivity, while workers in some backward place may have been forced to work 16 hours a day in primitive conditions, and may show higher productivity.)

One thing that GDP can’t reveal is the living standard of the average person in the nation. Of course, under normal circumstances, there is a high correlation between living standards and GDP per capita. But remember, GDP includes government services and expenses. If a nation has high productivity but its government uses all this high productivity to produce expensive weapons and stockpile them (or drop them on other nations), then the living standards of the nation, measured in produced goods and services, must be discounted by the product which goes into building those weapons. Yes, I know, the workers who produce them may still be paid, but the market will have fewer consumer goods for the money they may have.

And still another thing that GDP can’t reveal – and this is the most important of all for the purposes of this episode – is whether the nation is long-term oriented in its economic activities, or is short-term oriented. GDP is an aggregate, and it is neutral in relation to the question of whether the product of the nation was focused on consumption, or on investments. Why is this important?

To answer this question, the listeners of Axe to the Root need to go back to Episode 7, “The Nature of Economic Growth.” In it, we saw the example of the simplest possible economy, Robinson Crusoe on an uninhabited island. The most important question Robinson faces is whether he wants to continue with this subsistence economy, or whether he wants to grow it. But for him to grow it, he needs to forgo present consumption and spend some of his resources (time and food, or even go hungry for a day) to create tools that will increase his productivity: a 15ft pole, traps for goats, an enclosure for the goats, a frame for drying fruits, etc., etc. His time and resources can’t be spent simultaneously on producing food and on producing tools; he needs to decide how much consumption he is willing to forgo, otherwise he will have no economic growth. However, from the perspective of GDP, we won’t be able to tell if Robinson has worked on productivity or on consumption; his activities on any single day will be marked as the same GDP whether he was busy making the 15ft pole or foraging for berries.

And why is this important? Because, only by knowing what Robinson put his efforts into the previous day – consumption or investments – we will be able to predict what his GDP will be the next day. Obviously, if he put his efforts into foraging, he may have gone to bed full and happy, his next day’s GDP will be the same as the previous day’s. But if he put his efforts into investing in productivity, he may have gone to bed hungry and unhappy, but his next day’s GDP will be higher. And we don’t just want to measure the GDP of yesterday. We want to know what it tells us about tomorrow.

So, what does the growth of the GDP of the United States in the last two quarters tell us about tomorrow? A few days ago, Bob Bryan, analyst at Business Insider, put up an article which breaks down the GDP growth for the last quarter into different categories, in order to find out what it tells us about the future. And here’s what he discovered.

First, he points out that, indeed, the US GDP grew at a faster pace than expected: 3.5% instead of 3.3%, on an annual basis. That in addition to the previous quarter when it grew by 4.1%. But, as I mentioned above, the GDP numbers are a neutral aggregate; they don’t tell us what has grown and what hasn’t. Inside this 3.5%, there are some not so good facts about the direction our economy is taking.

The most obvious thing in it is that trade was the greatest drag on the economy in the last one quarter. Remember, when calculating GDP, exports are a plus, but imports are a minus. So when a country has a negative trade balance, this will affect the GDP: the GDP will be lower by the difference between imports and exports. Remember how Donald Trump constantly proclaims that his purpose is to make the world by American-made goods, and correct the trade deficit between America and the world? Well, in the last one quarter, that deficit actually became even worse, with the gaps between imports and exports widening even more. The reason, as we said earlier, was that US companies, in anticipation of the tariffs, rushed to fill their inventories with still cheaper materials. Such rush was not observed on the Chinese side, or on the side of any of America’s trading partners, whether the European Union or Canada or Mexico or Brazil or anyone else. For all practical purposes, Trump’s tariffs gave the world a significant financial injection in US dollars. If those economies were thinking of investing in new production facilities, this is a good time for it, while the American economy is simply piling up inventories. (And inventories are not investments, they are simply future consumption.)

The trade deficit was so gigantic that it actually dragged the GDP down by 1.8 percentage points. To give you an idea of what that means, it means that if the trade balance had remained neutral (at zero), we would have had a GDP growth of whopping 5.3% percent on an annual basis – something that hasn’t happened in the US for over 20 years! Apparently, whatever gains Trump thinks the US economy will get from his tariffs, will be simply making up for the deficit created by those same tariffs within the last six months.

Building up inventories, as I mentioned earlier, is not investment. It doesn’t change the productivity of the economy. Whether the inventories are full or half full, won’t change the rate by which the economy produces goods and services. So, in the dichotomy between investment and consumption we talked before, building up inventories must be counted on the side of consumption. The money that the producers spent on inventories can’t be used for building new production facilities – at least not until sometime in the future when these inventories are used for the production of consumer goods and then sold to the buyers. The question, however, is this: will the buyers in the future have the larger quantities of money to buy these consumer goods? It is good that we are preparing to produce more consumer goods. But what if the market runs out of purchasing power to buy them?

This question is very relevant to the situation, given another insight from Bob Bryan’s article, namely, that almost all of the GDP growth in the last quarter, and in the quarter before it, came from increased consumption. Or, as economists call it, “strong consumer confidence.” But “consumer confidence” is nothing more than the propensity of the consumers to spend more than save, an in fact, to be willing to go deeper into consumer debt. This fact is really startling, and should worry us immensely if we care about the future of America: almost all of the GDP growth of the US for the last quarter came from increased consumption, not from investments or trade. You may want to call it “consumer confidence,” but let’s call for it what it is: it is consuming the capital base our economy has built up so far. Purchases of consumer goods and services made a total contribution of 4.7 percentage points to that growth of 3.5%. That is an enormous increase. Where did the money for it come from?

Part of it, of course, came from Trump’s tax plan which went into effect in January this year. In general, it reduced the total tax revenues from income taxes by $2.5 to 3 billion a month. Apparently, all this money went into consumption; or, to be precise, into buying “durable consumer goods,” like TVs, furniture, clothing, etc. – the spending on such goods jumped by almost 7% (on an annual basis, again). People got their tax money back, and guess what they did: they didn’t invest it; they bought stuff. But this $2.5 to 3 billion a month can’t account for all of the increased consumption. Where did the rest of the money come from?

From the stock market.

Remember what I said earlier about the stock market this last year? The Dow Jones hit a record high of almost 27,000 in January and then collapsed by 10%. Then it climbed up again in October and collapsed again. This is not small money that is at play here and it can’t be easily dismissed; we are talking about a total market cap of trillions of dollars. What reality do the movements of these trillions of dollars reveal to us?

Stock prices go down under one simple condition: there are more sellers than there are bidders. That is, those who are holding that stock want to get rid of it. They believe it is overpriced, and they want to get the money for the stock. Either they don’t believe the stock is going to perform well in the future (remember, a stock price is entirely calculated on the basis of subjectively expected future dividends), or they value current consumption more than the future dividends. In general, when the stock market is going up, that means that more people forgo current consumption and seek future dividends. When the stock market is going down, that means that people prefer to spend the money right away; or that, at the most, they put their money in short-term debt instruments, which are all tied to either private consumption or government spending, not to long-term equity. I mentioned “consumer confidence” above; let me give you the other name for “consumer confidence”: investor’s pessimism.

This is the reason why the stock market has been on such unpredictable roller coaster for the last one year: because millions of people who normally save some of their money by buying stock (which has been the reason for the rising stock prices: rising demand), have now decided to rather spend their money on consumer goods instead. Why they do it is of no big significance: whether they do it because they don’t believe the stock market will perform, or because they just want to buy new things, is of no consequence. The result is the same: higher consumption, lower investment.

(And, keep in mind, some at least may do it because they know and expect that prices of consumer goods will go up with the new tariffs. Trump’s tariffs will hit not only companies, but individual consumers as well.)

So we have enormously increased consumption for the last two quarters which made the bulk of the increase in GDP. It is not that we are producing more; we are consuming more of what has been produced. You can’t expect consumption to grow the economy; if it could grow the economy, then starving Ethiopians should be able to grow their economy by just eating more. If it is absurd to tell Ethiopians that they need to eat more in order to grow their economy, then it is also absurd to think that higher consumption is really economic growth.

To that growth in consumption we need to add the growth in another one of the components: government spending. Government spending grew by about 5% on an annual basis, and added about 0.7% to the GDP growth. Which is quite alarming: if the government lets us keep more of our tax money but increases spending, that can possible mean only one thing: that the government deficit spending is increasing. Our kids will have to pay in the future for our GDP growth today.

But what happened to investments? Didn’t they grow as well?

They didn’t. Investments remained flat. Although, when we break them down, we see another rather alarming picture. Investments in equipment and real estate dropped by 8% (again, annual basis). Which means that US companies have refrained from investing in higher productivity, or even from maintaining the old facilities. Perhaps because they are planning on closing them due to the increased cost of steel, as several automakers already announced. American families also refrained from investing in the real estate market – either because they can’t afford it, or because they find current consumption more attractive.

What increased by 8% to make up for the drop in investments was what the Bureau of Economic Analysis calls, “investments in intellectual property.” That is, Americans and American companies refrained from investing in real estate and production facilities, but they bought computer programs. Remember when Franklin Graham, while shilling for Trump, said that there was no pride in being a programmer, but the real pride was in being a factory worker? Well, the US market proved him wrong: Looks like the real value is in being a computer programmer, while we are going to be losing factory jobs. Franklin Graham’s nonsense aside, there is a good reason why Americans invest in software: It is not subject to tariffs. A software company can outsource to India, China, Bulgaria, Estonia, Zambia, and the product they get will come over the Internet, and can’t be taxed with tariffs. Thus, the price of software is closer to the real market price. To invest in building a new plant will take buying steel; and since steel is now taxed additionally, it will be overpriced on the market, and therefore the investment won’t make sense.

I think we covered all of it, right? Remember, GDP is the sum of the following components: Consumption, Investments, Government expenditures, and Trade (Exports minus Imports). In itself, GDP is just an aggregate, and it is neutral in relation to these components and what they tell us. We need to look at each one of them separately in order to know what is happening.

So let’s summarize what we see in all these components as applied to the GDP growth of the last quarter:

Consumption was the largest motor behind the GDP growth. Americans went out and bought as many things as they could, increasing their consumption by 12% (on an annual basis) compared to previous quarters, which added close to 5% to the GDP growth. People took their extra money from tax savings, and also took their money from selling their stocks, and put it into consumption.

Government spending was the only other component that increased.

Trade was negative: imports outweighed exports by such a gigantic margin that trade added the whooping negative 1.8% to the GDP growth, something that hadn’t happened for many decades in the US. (Ironically, it happened under a president who vowed to fix America’s trade deficit.)

Investments remained flat. But in that flat, there is a nuance. Investments in equipment went down by 8%. What balanced it was investments in intellectual products (mainly software) which went up by 8%. We have no increased investments in production facilities. The promised opening of new jobs might need to wait for a while.

And in addition to it, we have been involved in a trade war against the whole world, which jacked up the prices for many goods and materials that are essential for our economy, while losing foreign markets for US exporters who had spent decades in investments to win those markets. At the same time, our opponents seem to have learned the lesson to lose the trade war before we do, and thus drive down their own costs in the race for increased productivity.

In summary: Our GDP is up. But that’s not necessarily good for our economy. We may be in the position of the farmer who decided to eat more than usual, only to find out that he has eaten his last seeds.

The reading assigned for this week will be an article, not a book. But it is an important article which you don’t want to miss, if you want to understand the dichotomy consumption/investments and its importance for the economy. The article is by Robert Higgs, and it is titled, “Regime Uncertainty.” It was published in The Independent Review, Volume 1, Number 4, of Spring 1997. You can find the PDF online. It is 31 pages long, and, as most writings by Robert Higgs, it is worth every word.

In your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books that bring the Gospel to every area of life. We do not limit the Gospel to a few spiritual propositions; we take it to bear to every place where curse is found. Including the economy – because we know that, Biblically, the economy is the sum of the moral decisions of people in the society. And we speak about it from a Biblical perspective. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 77 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to save you money. And save money for the American church in general, and may be even for the American conservatives in general. We are talking tons of money here, not just a few thousand dollars. We are talking in the billions. Yes, billions of dollars donated or paid by American Christians and conservatives to different causes and organizations, like NRA, HSLDA, ADF, the various pro-life organizations, etc., only to be wasted, and only to have a society that is much worse than it was before that money was spent. And despite the obvious failure to win the causes supposedly advanced by these organizations, American Christians and conservatives continue to donate and pay even more money, expecting different results from doing the same things. There are a number of those organizations that are supposedly conservative or even Christian, whose professed goals are to be Guardians, that is, to protect us, the individuals, from the ever encroaching totalitarian state. And they have become rich on our money, and yet, they have been losing the battle, step by step, little by little, with every year. We will shortly see how this scam works.

Before we start, let me return you to a previous episode of Axe to the Root, Episode 6 – one of the earliest episodes, titled “Denethor Ministries.” In that episode, we talked about the fact that modern American Christians spend billions of dollars in donations to ministries headed by churchian celebrities, and there is nothing to show for that money. Every time I mention this fact to modern Reformed Christians, they agree with me and they start pointing to people like Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, and other hyper-charismatic preachers. But the truth is, these hyper-charismatic ministries and celebrities are way poorer than many supposedly “Reformed” and “conservative” and “Bible-believing” ministries and celebrities. I mentioned a few of those in the episode: Franklin Graham with about $120 million a year in revenues, John MacArthur with over $70 million, Albert Mohler with over $30 million, etc. Numbers like this beat most of the hyper-charismatic preachers, and yet, for some reason, the majority of Reformed Christians are never capable of grasping that John MacArthur, for example, rakes in 2 to 2.5 times more than Joel Osteen. In general, when it comes to revenues, non-charismatic, supposedly “Reformed” celebrities beat the whole TBN Channel cast.

Anyway, the problem is not that so much money is given to them. The problem is rather that there is nothing to show for it. As I pointed out in that episode, even the very celebrities we are talking about admit that for the last decades Christianity in the US has deteriorated and weakened, and has become incapable of making a difference in the world. But that’s on their watch, for the same period they have been taking all that money and building their ministries with it. They have been the teachers and leaders of Israel all these years. They have been training pastors and theologians and church leaders. They have been doing all these gigantic conferences in those fancy air-conditioned buildings. So what do they have to show for the money we have paid them, again? What has come out of all these expensive activities? A decline. In that episode I made the supposedly scandalous remark that we could have had better results if we had spent all that money on bourbon instead. (Boy, did I get some flak for it.) But is it really scandalous to say that? Look at the churches in China, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America. Compared to our own churchian celebrities, they operate on almost zero budgets, and yet, in many of those places, Christianity has been winning people and has been changing cultures. Perhaps, judging from the facts, we should have spent our money somewhere else, and may be then we would have some victory here in America, don’t you think?

In that episode, I also pointed at the real reason why they produced such negative results for all that money: namely, their pessimistic eschatology. “It shall be done to you according to your faith,” Jesus said in Matthew 9:29, and this principle applies to more than healing: “The righteous shall live by faith.” When your expectations are that you will lose in history and on earth, and the only real victory in the world you can have is as remote as the end of history, it will be unto you according to your faith: you won’t see any victory, or progress, or increase from your efforts in history. Your own faith will doom you to a life of fruitlessness and stagnation. Even when you have some victory or increase, you will consider it just a temporary thing, and you will be psychologically prepared for greater defeats. And that’s what has been happening to these ministries. That’s why I called them Denethor ministries: after the character from The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, who was given the important and powerful office of Steward of Gondor, but whose eschatology was pessimistic and defeatist. So when the final battle came, he had no moral strength to lead his troops into battle, and went insane.

What is more important for our topic today, however, is not those ministries, but their listeners. Namely, what the impact is of such pessimistic ideology on their listeners, and how it informs their social action, and their political action as well. And, as a consequence of that, how it informs their spending of their money for political and social causes. It should be obvious that when you have millions of listeners who have been intoxicated with such pessimistic ideology for decades, they – and the whole society, influenced by them – wouldn’t have any optimistic expectations for the future, right? They wouldn’t expect any victory in the cultural realm. They wouldn’t expect any victory in the political realm either. Even if they happen to witness some victory in the political or cultural realm, they would expect it to be short-lived, and the future still full with more struggles, and an inevitable decline into more social, cultural, and political evil. If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever.

Let me repeat this, in case y’all missed it:

If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever.

And let me tell you, folks: There’s money in it. Huge money.

Let me explain why.

How does one make money today? I mean, in an honest way, not by crime or government extortion (forgive the tautology). There are three main categories of money making: production, commerce, and maintenance. Production is, obviously, producing new economic value out of raw resources which have no value for the end user (that’s why they are raw). Commerce is bridging the gap between those who have the economic value and those who want it – whether that gap is geographical, or financial, and temporal, it is still a gap. And maintenance – which today is the largest part of our economy in terms of people employed – is preventing that economic value from deteriorating. You can think of maintenance as the “keep” clause of God’s command in Genesis 2:15 when He put man in the Garden: cultivate it (create new value) and keep it (prevent the old value from deteriorating). Part of that maintenance is prophylactics: taking the necessary measures to prevent or slow down the natural wear and tear. (Think changing the oil in your car.) The other part is repair: restoring the economic value of an item after it was made useless by natural or unnatural causes. Or, to put in a fancier way: problem-solving. People pay good money for problem-solving these days.

Now let’s say you want to start a career in repair. What is it that you need to make money? Well, of course, you need people who have broken things. That is, people with problems to solve. The more, the better: your market niche will be larger, and you get to expand. But you have a problem: people who buy things, prefer to buy higher quality of them, that is, things that will break more rarely. And those on the production side are eager to oblige, because – well, because they have to run against competition, and the competition will be doing the same.

What is your solution? Well, there are several possible solutions, but the one that first comes to mind is known to serious economists as “the broken window solution.” Yes, yes, I know there are some not-so-serious economists who call it “the broken window fallacy.” But we know that, from the perspective of a certain part of the economy – the repair sector, that is – it is rather a solution, not a fallacy. And what does that solution say? It says that it is good to break windows from time to time, so that people who specialize in repairing windows have business – and thus, you know, keep the economy running. If you want to visualize it, watch Charlie Chaplin’s movie, The Kid. The movie shows exactly how it is done. Keep in mind, though, that The Kid was a century ago. We are in the 21st century now, and we may want to have an automatized window-breaking in order to keep us having business. Or automatized creation of any kind of problems. That would solve our economic problems, as many economists would tell you.

Now, what are lawyers? Lawyers are repairmen. They are paid to fix things. I mean, not your TV or your car or your plumbing or your Windows 10. The thing they fix is more impalpable: your judicial standing before the courts. They do not create new value: you are born in a state of innocence before the courts, as far as a truly just society is concerned. (Take note: innocence only before the human courts, not before God.) It takes some sort of event, some damage, to have your judicial standing impaired – either you have to commit a crime, or you have to be accused of a crime. Or, a crime has to be committed against you – although, in this case, normally, you shouldn’t need a lawyer; the state through its public prosecutor is supposed to be your protector, after all, since you are the victim. Either way, in the normal course of events, you shouldn’t need to worry, if you are not a criminal, and therefore you shouldn’t need a lawyer. Which means, a solid, righteous, and just Christian society should be a good news to you: most probably, you won’t need a lawyer your whole life.

And that was the case in Christendom for centuries. Not that Christendom was the ideal society, but it still had certain social and judicial standards which made lawyers rather needless. Those who went into law were considered rather low class. In the literature of Great Britain and the United States of the late 19th century, the phrase “penniless lawyer” occurs way too often. (Horatio Alger’s fans among our listeners will remember, “Mr. Manning was a penniless lawyer.”) Being a church preacher was considered much more promising and rewarding financially than being a lawyer. Back in the 18th century colonial America’s colleges, lawyers and pastors studied the same subjects for two years, then lawyers were ready to pass the bar and start their practice; pastors had to study for two more years before they could graduate. There was really not much work for lawyers, mainly because the society was closer to the Biblical ideal, and the civil government was limited to its judicial functions. In such a society, court cases were mainly over crimes committed by individuals against other individuals, or civil disputes between individuals or between companies. And many of these disputes – or even criminal cases – were regularly resolved outside the courts, through civil arbitration.

This started changing at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Since the French Revolution, the abandonment of Christianity as the underlying ethics for the social order brought back the pagan ideas of the state as the ultimate owner of the society; thus, the executive state of the ancient pagan empires was revived as a concept under new names. By the time of WWI, most Western nations had switched to it, and the state was now increasingly reaching out to executively control every aspect of man’s life and society. This introduced two major changes to the judicial process: First, it instituted a new participant in the judicial process: the executive state. It has been there before, of course, but it only acted in relation to its servants – individuals who have taken the oath to serve as representatives of the state in justice, war, and diplomacy. Now everyone – oath or not – was by default a servant of the state and therefore liable to be dragged to court by the state. That’s why we have so many court cases that list The United States or some state or some other government entity as one of the parties. And, second, the judicial process changed its purpose from maintaining the peace between private entities (individuals and associations) to establishing the supremacy of the state in all relations. A man now could not just mind his business and get along and not need a lawyer. He was now subject to tens of thousands of executive and administrative rules that made him a criminal by default, unless he obeyed them all to the tee.

This change was great news to all lawyers. Men were not born free and innocent anymore. They were born enslaved and guilty by default, and they would need lawyers to help them maintain their judicial status all their lives. The executive state was to the guild like the kid in that Chaplin’s movie to the glass repairman. Or even more than that: a constant automatic barrage of stones on every single window in the neighborhood. That is, more work than all the existing repairmen could handle. In 1870, lawyers were still rather lower middle class. Within 50 years, in 1920, they were among the richest men in America. Jeremy Bentham quipped once that the power of a lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law. Under the growing executive state, the law became so complex that uncertainty became its most prominent characteristic: depending on how one could interpret and re-interpret the law, a man could be both innocent and a criminal for the same actions. And since the government prosecutors are always eager to prove themselves by taking the worst possible interpretation, lawyers found a gold mine in being hired to find the best possible interpretations. Throughout the 20th century, the law profession became one of the most valuable of all, and law education became more expensive than even medical education.

With the money came the social influence. And with the social influence came the political influence. Alan Dershowitz remarked once that “It’s every lawyer’s dream to help shape the law, not just react to it.” That dream has been coming true more and more throughout the 20th century. As of today, 36% of the members of Congress are lawyers – in case you thought Congress was a realistic representation of the American public. Congress, the Senate, and the different departments of the executive currently hire more than 40,000 lawyers to “shape policy,” which means to determine what new laws they are going to hit American citizens with every year. Think about it. Tens of thousands of lawyers shaping laws, which then these same lawyers must be hired to sort out and clarify, so that the average Joe on the street stays clear of jail. Spiffy, heh? Imagine tens of thousands of glass repairmen shaping the laws of the country. How long do you think the average lifetime of a window pane would be?

In short, the broken-window policy is the official philosophy of our government today. Except that the “windows” are the legal standings of hundreds of millions of individuals. They are legislatively kept in a broken condition every single day, so that lawyers have work to do.

Enter the Guardians.

It was in the 1960s and the 1970s when a number of people started awakening to the reality of the growing executive state. (To the shame of the church, unbelievers took leadership. In fact, the hippies were far more conscious about the dangers of totalitarianism than the average church-goer. The churches in fact supported the growing socialist state. Many even supported Roe v. Wade.) And the solution most people were comfortable with was the creation of lobbyist organizations who would be the lawyers of the people against the state. Like, the state has its own lawyers who shape laws so as to break everyone’s windows so that there is more work for lawyers. The people will have their own lawyers who will be there on Capitol Hill, who will lobby against laws that break windows, and thus protect the people. One group of lawyers will make money out of window-breaking laws. The other group of lawyers will make money out of striking down window breaking laws. Simple. And the people don’t have to do much, just pay their own group of lawyers in donations – after they have paid the government’s group of lawyers in taxes – and they will have their rights and interests protected.

The NRA is a textbook case of that shift. It was established in 1871 with the purpose to improve the marksmanship of the average American – after it was assessed that the Union armies scored one hit per every 1,000 shots they made, and that was not good enough. So, at the beginning, the organization was concerned with setting up ranges and teaching Americans to shoot properly and accurately. In 1934, however, they established their Legislative Affairs Division, and – mark this one – that division testified before Congress in favor of the first gun-control law, the National Firearms Act. Makes sense, after all: you hire lawyers, and the lawyers want to help shape a law that would make many individuals criminals, so that the lawyers can then defend them in court. For the next 40 years the NRA lobbied for one gun-control measure after another. In 1968, it stood in support of the Gun Control Act, a law that was entirely motivated by the Black Panthers Party demonstrating around government buildings. The NRA’s position at the time was strongly leftist and anti-Constitutional, namely, that the Second Amendment did not protect individual rights but only applied to organized state militias; we know what party today supports such interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

The NRA changed its position only around 1975. By that time, the Legislative Division had taken over the organization, and the organization had little to do with the original concept and purpose; it was devoted mainly to lobbying now. In 1975, the NRA started a shift towards protecting those rights that it helped erode for the previous 40 years. Now that the laws were passed, and a legislative momentum was established, the NRA now took the other side to defend it against those same laws and against that same momentum. All of sudden, overnight, the NRA became a strong Second Amendment defender. Forty years of breaking windows . . . now’s the time to shoulder strap that pane holder and soften some caulk, and go repair them. For a fee, of course.

The 1970s and the 1980s saw an increased number of such lobbyist and political organizations emerge. Other gun rights lobbyists also emerged. The efforts of Jerry Falwell gave the start to Moral Majority, and an increased awareness of the injustice of abortion. (Before that, most churches either didn’t care, or some – like the Southern Baptist Convention – even supported it.) That led to the emergence of various pro-life groups and organizations. Some were practical and sought real measures to end abortion: like Operation Rescue. Most, however, took the path of political lobbyism. The National Right to Life Committee was established as early as 1968, but many of its chapters were set up in the following two decades. In 1983, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association was founded, with the purpose of political lobbyism and legal defense of the right to homeschool. Different other homeschool organizations appeared as well in different states. In 1990, Ray Sekulow established the American Center for Law and Justice to protect human and civil rights. The Alliance Defense Fund was established with the same purpose in 1993. Etc., etc., etc. The rise of the executive state in the first half of the 20th century created a demand for lawyers who would protect the individual from that state. Such demand for lawyers was not present before the early 20th century. In the second half of the 20thcentury, lawyers moved in to meet the demand.

So, the question now is this: Now that we have the understanding that the individual needs to be protected against the state, how are his new defenders supposed to go about it? What is the most effective way of freeing the individual from the state?

The answer should be obvious to anyone who can think logically: If we had freedom for the individual before, and if the dangers to his legal status came later with the introduction of the numerous laws of the executive state, then, duh, the best way to protect him is to return to the old ways of the old days, right? After all, we are all “conservatives,” n’est-ce pas? We should be all about restoring the good old days. We didn’t have laws about regulation and control of guns; and we had freedom about guns, so there wasn’t any danger of violating any gun regulations. We had zero laws about schools and education; so there wasn’t any danger of violating laws about homeschooling. We had zero laws about carrying an ID; so there wasn’t any danger of being arrested for no ID. We had zero laws about taxes and tax exemptions for non-profit organizations; so there wasn’t any danger of having to deal with soulless tax collectors, or be careful what you say from your pulpit, or of messing up your tax return. To summarize, our liberty did not consist of having the right laws or the right government action in enforcing them. It consisted of having no laws outside outlawing criminal behavior (an attack on life, liberty, or property), and having no government action outside the courts. True liberty, after all, consists in having very few laws.

Or even better than that: true liberty consists in having no laws that define when, where, and how you can exercise your liberty. And in giving the government neither the right nor the prerogative to define your liberty, period. The fewer laws we have, the more liberty. The more limited the scope of our laws is, the more liberty. That’s why the Law of God in the Bible is called “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25), because it is limited to only Ten Commandment a few dozen case laws. The Talmud says that there are 613 laws in the Bible, but the truth is, the majority of them are multiple repetitions of the same laws; so the real number is probably not more than 100. (Compare this to the tens of thousands of laws and regulations that the federal government produces every year. And that excludes the ones produced by the local governments.) And none of these laws give any executive power to the state; in fact, even the power to wage war is a judicial, not an executive power, and war was declared by judges in the Bible, for specific crimes, not as an executive policy of the state. (On the executive state, listen to my lectures at the Freedom Conference in Tucumcari NM last year.) You don’t violate God’s boundaries, and you don’t violate other people’s boundaries; and the Law of God doesn’t say anything about the state’s boundaries. The state is not supposed to impose boundaries on individuals (other than the ones God explicitly imposed), nor make any demands of God or of men. That’s the perfect Law of Liberty.

Given all this, what do you think a lobbyist of a lawmaker is supposed to fight for, if they want to protect or restore liberty? That’s right, they should fight for – or lobby for, or vote for, or speak up for, or evangelize for – the repeal of all laws that give the state power over individuals. We want to protect the liberty of gun owners. Good. The solution is to lobby for and demand the repeal of all gun control laws and regulations, starting from the National Firearms Act of 1934. We want to protect businesses from socialist regulations. Good. The solution is to lobby for and demand the repeal of all laws that regulate economic activity. We want to protect homeschooling families and private schools. Good. The solution is to lobby for and repeal all laws that get the government involved in the business of education. Etc., etc., etc. If you are honest in your professed mission to defend liberty, your only job must be to fight for the repeal of all laws that give the government power or control over any aspect of life. Any other activity would qualify you as either self-deceived, or dishonest.

So, is that what all these organizations have been doing? Not at all. To the contrary, all of them have been busy lobbying for more and more laws, defining finer and finer points of how, where, and when we can exercise our liberty – all in the name of protecting us, of course. The lobbyist efforts have expanded enormously, and all these organizations have been absorbing billions of dollars, and yet, the result has been more laws and less liberty.

Take the Home School Legal Defense Association, for example. Until the 1980s, most states did not have laws that regulate education. That made it possible for homeschooling families to teach their kids without any interference from government bureaucrats. States like Texas that had such regulation provisions for education, did see pressure from educational bureaucrats on families (and in the Leeper case, homeschooling was protected only when the court struck down some of the government regulations). But such states were in the minority. The majority of the states had no regulation of education, and homeschooling was simply a traditional form for many families, especially in the rural areas. Private community schools (not run by any government) and parochial schools operated independently of any government regulation or supervision, and had no problems. The hippie movement created a number of homeschooling families and communes who had their own volunteer schools, and were not harassed by the government. Most of the reaction against homeschoolers in the 1960s and the 1970s was limited to a few urban areas where regulations existed. (And in fact, some of the reaction came as the result of the actions of church ministers who hated homeschooling and reported Christian homeschoolers to the state.) There was reaction, of course, but it was not so widespread, and the right solution was the removal of all regulations. The HSLDA, however, focused on active lawmaking with the purpose of creating new education laws in every state, including where they had not existed before. The purported idea was to create legal defense for homeschoolers. But in reality, such new laws and regulations only cemented the state as the new authority to define education. The laws became multiple and thus uncertain; and remember, the power of a lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law. Homeschoolers became “protected” through a system that broke windows at every step and therefore required a glass repairman at every step. And the HSLDA was always there to provide expert repair services.

Similar was – and still is – the situation with the NRA. Remember the murder of Philando Castille in 2016 by Jeronimo Yanez. The NRA remained silent on the issue for a long time, even though Castille was a registered gun owner. After the NRA got criticized publicly for its silence, Dana Loesch of the NRA offered the excuse that Castille should have put his hands on the wheel first (even though he was only reaching for his driver’s license), and later changed the story to that Castille was carrying his weapon illegally, because he was in possession of marijuana. In other words, the NRA declared that they believe that the simple text of the Second Amendment must be ignored in favor of the theory that the government should set when, how, and under what circumstances individuals can exercise their Second Amendment liberties. It shouldn’t be a surprise, though, given the history of the NRA and their theory of “responsible carrying,” which means, carrying subject to limitations by the government. The NRA never lobbied to restore the legal status of weapons to what it was before the National Firearms Act of 1934; to the contrary, they have worked hard to pile new laws and regulations over old laws and regulations, all designed to make it harder and harder for an individual to carry a gun and yet remain “legal.” Gotta break those windows.

The ADF went even father: they tried to convince people to break their own windows. In an initiative in the last 10 years, they called pastors to send letters to the IRS openly declaring that they are going to be preaching on politics and thus violating the Johnson Amendment. The IRS has been reluctant to track pastors for the Johnson Amendment anyway, but this placed many pastors within the IRS’s cross hairs. The ADF, however, never called for the obvious solution: the abolition of the IRS. The solution was sought within the same system, with just newer and newer regulations and amendment.

And the same situation can be seen with the various pro-life organizations: the very term “pro-life” today means simply lobbying for regulations on abortion, not for the total abolition of abortion. That is, it simply means “pro-death within the limits of the law.”

There are many more examples, some more prominent, some less, on state and county level, but in general, lobbyist organizations that claim to protect individuals against the different levels of government. The pretended objectives never really materialize. The individuals are never really protected, only under a heavier burden of regulations that create more and more problems. And in all these more and more problems, there is more and more need for lawyers to come in and sort it out. For a fee, of course.

And yet, the paying public continues to ignore the fact that the promised victory is never closer than the last year, or than 10 years ago; but is, in fact, much farther away. We can’t even imagine returning to the freedom of the 1970s, let alone to the freedom of the 1770s anymore. The problems pile up, the lawyers make their money, and Christians and conservatives seem to not notice the scam. How is this possible?

It is possible because of the Denethor ministries. Specifically, because of their eschatology. When your eschatology is pessimistic about the victory of the Gospel in history and on earth, all you expect on earth is eternal problems – including in the political realm. Any victory will be by default temporary and limited. Any loss will be permanent and sweeping. All we can do in history is fend off the enemy’s forces until Jesus comes. Until then, we can have no victory.

It is not difficult to see why such eschatology will be the best eschatology for lawyers: if you believe that victory will never be possible in history, and if you believe that problems are here to stay and multiply, then you believe that it is normative for your window to always get broken – and in fact, to be broken more frequently, every day. When an organization works to make sure that you never really get victory but your problems multiply and get worse over time, this won’t raise your suspicions. To the contrary, it will be normal for you. And then, it will be normal for you to expect that nothing can be done about it except for paying your fees to lawyers to protect you, until Christ comes back. What else can you do, after all, given that there can be no victory this side of the Second Coming?

In other words, if you are looking for conspiracies, no need to look at Soros or some world cabal of powerful bankers. The conspiracy is much closer to your home, and much more mundane and obvious: liberal lawyers working for the government who help shape the laws, conservative lobbyists who claim to be “protecting” the public but actually lobby for more power to the government to define and limit our freedoms, and evangelical and Reformed pastors who keep their listeners convinced that there is no other way, because there can be no cultural or political victory this side of the Second Coming.

What is the solution to this? The solution must start from where the problem started: namely, the theology and the eschatology of the modern churches. The crippling effect of the theology of  escape and defeat can be cured only by abolishing that theology in our pulpits, and replacing it with a postmillennial eschatology of victory: that history is the progressive manifestation of the victory of Christ on earth. Our normative expectations must be expectations of victory – not only in our personal lives, but in the society and its laws as well.

The next step is the de-funding all organizations that have proven to part of the problem by never actually solving it. Not only the NRA, the HSLDA, the ADF, or the various pro-life organizations, every single lobbyist and law institution and organization must be thoroughly examined by Christians and conservatives in respect to its true ideology and track record. If there is no expectation of quick victory – by repealing laws that limit liberty, not by making new laws that define it – and if there is no plan for quick victory, that organization’s true goal is to continue profiting from perpetuating problems. Such conduct must be penalized by Christians by  de-funding. And in fact, the de-funding must be extended to the pastors who are part of that conspiracy. Any church that preaches anything less than victory for the Kingdom of God in history, or any church that is not doing anything in the culture to achieve that victory, must be denied funding until it either changes its preaching or its leadership. Christian money can’t go to causes that only strengthen the enemy, and enslave the people of God. No more broken-window solutions, and no more theories that justify institutionalized window breaking.

And the third step is, we need to lay the foundations for our own alternative culture with alternative solutions to everything. But this is a matter a different episode, or may be even a book.

That book is Joel McDurmon’s Restoring America, One County at a Time. Joel has done an enormous job in describing how we can take back America without having to rely on an elite of lawyers and politicians and pastors to restore the liberty this country was once known for. Make that book a required reading in your family and your church, and among your bourbon-and-brisket buddies (or your pumpkin-spice-latte buddies, if you prefer). And then find ways to act on it.

Also, as usual, in your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books that bring the Gospel to every area of life. We do not preach defeat, and we do not preach constant problems. We preach that the victory of the Gospel is inevitable in history, and on earth. And we are working to achieve. Help us give Christians in Eastern Europe the tools to achieve it. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate for a cause that is worth it. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 76 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes our topic will be a hard one to deal with – a hard one, at least, in our age in the West today, where stories like what we are going to hear sound like they have come from an horror movie, not from the hard reality of the last one century. But whether we like to believe that they are real or not, they are real. The last century was replete with them, mainly because that last century saw the proliferation and the political dominance of the ideologies that produce such stories. I personally lived through some of that political dominance, although, only in the last decade before it disintegrated, so I saw only the last remnants of those stories. But nevertheless, the society where I grew up was entirely conditioned and marked by the fruits of these ideologies and these stories; and I myself took long to shake off the impact they had on me while I was growing up.

But don’t make the mistake to believe that such stories are irreversibly and irretrievably in the past, and there is no danger of them happening in our day, on our soil. History is inevitably, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, moving upward towards a greater manifestation of the Kingdom of God on earth – note well, on earth – but there is no guarantee in God’s Word that God won’t visit from time to time the curses of the past upon a nation that has forgotten His Covenant, again, as a manifestation of His Kingdom on earth. (A manifestation of a Kingdom, after all, includes legal sanctions against its enemies.) Stories like what I am going to share, and the tenets of the ideology that made them possible, are actually quite common today, even if in a less striking form, and there is very little that separates us from having them in its fully developed forms; human nature remains the same, after all, and without the restraint of God’s Common Grace, men turn back into monsters. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in his inauguration speech as a governor of California; but the principle applies to everything, not only freedom. Not only is freedom never more than one generation away from extinction, the horrors of tyranny – the GULags, the gas chambers, the Holodomor, the prisoners skinned alive, the Christians burning as torches for the Emperor’s parties – are never more than one generation away from re-appearing, if we forget God’s Word and Law. “It can’t happen here” has been the most common, and least successful prediction in the history of mankind. Eventually, those who let their guard down because “it can’t happen here,” saw it happen, and suffered for it. And their children suffered as well.

The ideology I am talking about is collectivism.

We have mentioned collectivism before in previous Axe to the Root episodes. I have mentioned it in other places, especially in relation to the doctrine of Biblical individualism – namely, the concept that before God, the individual is a legitimately independent moral entity. “Independent” not in the sense that he is not dependent on God for his moral nature, nor that he won’t be judged by God for his moral actions; it should be perfectly clear that no Christian can speak of such independence. (Although, free-will theologies – Pelagian and Arminian – do postulate a certain level of independence of man from God, especially in terms of his moral nature.) The meaning of “independent” here is that man’s covenantal standing before God is not dependent in any way of his belonging to a human group or collective – family, local church, genetic, ethnic, or national entity, social stratum or status, professional guild, political party, etc. While belonging to or membership in any such entity or collective may be an important secondary or inferior cause (to borrow Calvin’s terminology) for a man’s willingness to obey God, or for his training to good works, in the final account, God deals with man according to man’s individual standing before God, without any regard for any collectives he may have been part of. This understanding of the moral value and significance of the individual has been central to the ability of the early church to break from the pagan relations or the Jewish traditions of its immediate culture – all early imperial edicts against Christianity accuse Christians of abandoning the traditions of their clans or ethnic groups or ancestors. It was also central to the doctrines of the Reformation; and from there we have this central Reformation doctrine of the Right and Duty of Private Judgment (so conveniently forgotten today by all pastors that claim to be “Reformed”). That foundational individualism of the Christian faith against any group or collective – and even against the institutional church – was aptly expressed by the Anglican bishop and Reformed theologian and teacher, J.C. Ryle, in the following words:

Shall we then be content to err — merely because the Church errs? Will our company be any excuse for our error? Will our erring in company with the Church remove our responsibility for our own souls? Surely it is a thousand times better for a man to stand alone and be saved — than to err in company with the Church, and be lost! It is better to “prove all things” — and go to Heaven; than to say, “I dare not think for myself” — and go to Hell!

It is for this reason the movement for Christian Reconstruction, from the very beginning, has recognized that Christian Reconstruction must be grounded in personal conversion and conviction, and in individual sanctification and purpose, for any other project of Christian Reconstruction to be successful. Men can’t get their families to be in covenant with God unless they are individually in covenant with God. Institutional churches can’t be in covenant with God unless the people in them are individually in covenant with God first, and only through that covenant, in covenant with each other. A nation can’t be in covenant with God unless there is a critical mass of socially and politically active people who are each individually in covenant with God. There is no substitute for the laborious and unpleasant work of evangelizing and discipling the individual; it has to be done for anything else in the Kingdom of God to be done – and this is the reason why such disproportionate number of Christian Reconstructionists – even those who are not professional ministers of the Gospel – have a history of street preaching, foreign missions and evangelism, or street activism and anti-abortion ministries. Once we learn to work to convert the individuals, the rest is easy. Institutions may come and go, but a converted and discipled individual continues to convert and disciple other people his whole life (2 Tim. 2:2). Of course, the work must not stop at converting individuals; it must continue to converting whole groups and nations in their judicial and corporate structure and laws. Individualism is not the same as atomism where all that matters is internal personal ethics. But before a society is converted, it has to start with converting the individuals.

This legitimacy of the individual as an independent moral agent has always been a serious problem for all pagan religions and philosophies – and for many heretical teachings in the church as well, including the modern churches in America, including the majority of those who pass for “Reformed.” To be more precise, the serious problem is this: “How do you allow the individual to be a free, independent moral agent with his own will, aspirations, and individual purpose, and yet keep your people together, obedient to the same common will, pursuing the same common goals, and willing and capable of sacrificing for causes that are greater than any individual himself?” Biblical Christianity has no such problem; it has the Holy Spirit Who can work both as one and as many; He can have one overriding plan for history, and yet, He can figuratively “split” Himself (humanly speaking) into an infinite number of abiding places in the hearts of an infinite number of believers, and guide them to serve His plan while keeping each individual a free and independent moral agent, acting on his own free – but redeemed – will. But pagan and heretical religions and ideologies have nothing like the Holy Spirit that can ensure a shared cause and common action across large groups of people over long periods of time, while allowing for the freedom of the individual. Once the individual is given the freedom to be an independent moral agent, from a pagan perspective, chaos follows. It is for that reason that libertarianism – political ideology based on the freedom of the individual – is hated by all pagan and heretical thinkers, and even those non-Christians who claim to be “libertarian” eventually fall into some ideology of collectivism. And it is for that reason why R.J. Rushdoony declared that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had. But more about this in a future episode.

The freedom of the individual to be an independent moral agent can lead to only two social outcomes: either individuals filled with the Holy Spirit produce a society of righteousness and justice for all, where the social order is based on mutual respect rather than institutional tyranny, or unredeemed individuals following the lusts of their own hearts bringing the society to collapse in lawlessness. Both outcomes together are a powerful testimony for the superiority of the Christian faith over all other faiths and ideologies. Thus, any ideology and religion that wants to rival Christianity, will have to ensure that the individuals in the society do not have the freedom to make their own moral decisions or even identify themselves as free individuals. Every pagan ideology and religion will have to chain individuals to a group or to an institution, and only allow then to define themselves in the context of that group or institution; otherwise there will be no effective means of control.

And that’s what the real covenantal meaning of collectivism is: an ideology which subjects individuals to the moral dictatorship of human collectives and/or elites, with the purpose of re-educating them into obedient pawns. Where collectivist bonds have been weakened, the Gospel has always had an easy point of entry. I have experienced it personally: the fall of Communism (a strongly collectivist ideology) in Eastern Europe in 1989 led to a significant awakening of the Christian faith in the 1990s, leading to a situation that is far from ordinary in history: a younger generation that is much more religious and open to discussing spiritual issues than its parents. (And the parents to a great extent remain faithful to their collectivist ideology.) To a smaller extent, I have seen it in my mission work among the Gypsy minority in Bulgaria: the longest preserved thoroughly pagan culture in Europe that has remained impervious to Christianity for millennia, because it has always been collectivist: a strongly patriarchal clan society where the individual is subjected to the clan and the family. (And, as I have often pointed out, patriarchy is always hostile to Christianity, even when it pretends to be “Biblical.”) The Gypsy patriarchal society started disintegrating even under Communism, under pressure from its collectivist rival, Communism – state collectivism against family collectivism – and the social upheavals of the 1990s dealt some even worse blows. This dissolution of the collectivist character of the Gypsy society was what opened the door for many of us missionaries to enter and bring the Gospel to many ordinary people who are now left free to think and act for themselves. Collectivism, thus, has always been a strong social tool for opposition to the Gospel, and has been deliberately used by the enemies of God to that purpose.

However, to make an individual – let alone many individuals – lose his individuality and personality and submit entirely to an institutional system of power is not an easy task. There is the spirit that God has put in every man as part of God’s image in him. That spirit wars against any external control by other men. In redeemed men, it is expressed in righteous rebellion with the purpose of being free to do God’s will – think Moses’s resistance to Pharaoh or David’s resistance to Saul. In the unredeemed, it is expressed in selfish rebellion to establish one’s own superiority over others or to simply follow the lusts of one’s heart – this Jeroboam’s rebellion against Rehoboam. (Note, however, that even in that latter case, the Holy Spirit was on the side of the rebel, not on the side of human powers.) Modern collectivists – especially in the modern churches – like to dismiss that rebellion with the words, “He just hates all authority.” The truth, however, is that such behavior is not motivated by hatred; it is the natural outworking of the image of God in man, just like work and entrepreneurship and the desire for knowledge. Granted, such natural outworking may be ethically twisted by the twisted image of God in unredeemed men, but even then, it is still the natural outworking of the image of God. Man is created to be free of other men’s domination and to resist other men; it is in his DNA, figuratively speaking. And such natural instinct can only be suppressed by a thorough suppression of the image of God in man. Thus, for collectivism to achieve its purposes, it has to suppress the image of God in man, and this completely wipe out man’s individuality and personality. And to this purpose, collectivists in history have created a number of techniques to mold and shape human behavior in ways that will deprive men of their individuality. And understanding these techniques is important to us today when we need to spot collectivism in the society around us.

I will look at several main techniques here, taken from a book by Bruno Bettelheim, titled, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. Bettelheim was an Austrian Jew. He graduated in philosophy and history of art from the University of Vienna in the 1930s. Since in that period, art was viewed entirely from a Freudian perspective (as an expression of the unconscious), a degree in history of art included multiple courses in psychology – heavily Freudian – and was naturally considered also as a degree in psychology. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, he was arrested and first in the Dachau, and then in the Buchenwald concentration camps. Less than a year later, in a very rare gesture of amnesty, Hitler ordered the release of several hundred concentration camp inmates for his 50th birthday. Bettelheim was one of them. He knew the amnesty would be short-lived, and he immediately got on a ship to the US, to join his wife Gina who had already emigrated. In the US, we was able to build a career as a psychologist and write several books, among which was The Informed Heart. The book is a scientific study into the conflict between human personality and mass collectivism, drawing from the 10-month experience he had as a concentration camp inmate in Dachau and Buchenwald.

The following is a summary of collectivist techniques of killing individuality. I have not done that summery myself; I am using the work of other authors who reviewed Bettelheim’s book. Nevertheless, the summary is correct and it agrees with my assessment after I read the book, so you can take it as something I agree with. When you listen about the techniques, notice their perverse covenantal nature – they are all about the ethical-judicial nature of man, and they are all trying to either destroy that nature, or to completely pervert it to its opposite. Bettelheim was a Freudian psychologist, which means, he believed that human behaviors is not self-consciously ethical but only subconscious. And yet, when he observed real-world interactions, he couldn’t help but see the ethical nature of human behavior.

The first and most basic technique of any collectivist government is to make people engage in pointless work. Or, work of no value at all. Work for the sake of the work, not for the sake of results.

For the 12 years of its existence, Nazi Germany employed hundreds of thousands of inmates and prisoners of war in its factories, its agriculture, and even in its war effort. Prisoners were made to produce ammunition, or food for the war machine, or even brought to the front lines and forced to dig trenches and build fortifications. They were treated with horrible cruelty; some were even shown movies of how the bombs they were building were destroying buildings and people in their home countries. They were forced to sleep and eat on their work places, and the conditions were not better than the conditions for the slaves on the Roman triremes. And yet, despite all the terrible conditions and cruel treatment, prisoners who came out of it were in a fairly good psychological condition, and were capable of recovering quickly after the war. The reason: their work still had some value, and they could still count it as their personal accomplishment that they built something real – even if they were forced to build it against their own cause.

But the Nazis went further: they made some prisoners do useless work. Or work that made no sense. In one such experiment, a group of prisoners was treated fairly leniently, but they were told to move a gigantic pile of rocks from one side railroad tracks to the other. As long as the prisoners perceived that there was a reason for it – like cleaning the place for building something else – they did their work without any problem. After the pile was moved, they were ordered to move it back to the place it had been before. And then back again. And then back again. When the prisoners started realizing that that was going to be their future, for as long as they were kept prisoners, many of them went insane, and some attempted suicide. In another such experiment, a group of prisoners was told to dig trenches using their bare hands and pocket knives. While working, a pile of new shovels was unloaded from a truck and left near the job, within sight for the prisoners. They were never allowed to use the shovels, however. Some prisoners dared to ask if they could use the shovels, but were brutally punished for it. After several days, the nonsense of having the shovels but not using them was taking a heavy toll on the prisoners’ psychology. Within another few days, the Nazis had a group that was completely silent and obedient to anything the guards would say or command.

Doing work without purpose turned out to be a great tool for preparing people’s minds for the worse techniques of collectivism. Solzhenitsyn describes similar techniques used by the GULag guards. The US military used them with imprisoned Indian braves during the Indian Wars. There is something in working without purpose that is especially destructive to the human soul. God has created man to be working, as the ultimate expression of the image of God, but he also created him to be an eschatological being, that is, a being that looks to the future as a scene of unfolding results of his work. Fruit, therefore, or results, or achievements, are central to the fulfillment of man. Make him work, but deny him the eschatology of his work – that is, the purpose and meaningful fruit of it – and the image of God in man is destroyed. Purposelessness is the beginning of the destruction of man.

The second common technique of all collectivist governments is the introduction of a multitude of mutually exclusive rules so that violations become inevitable.

Remember the murder of Daniel Shaver, a young father of two, in a hotel in Arizona, by Philip Brailsford, a cop with the Phoenix PD, back in 2016? Brailsford was acquitted by the court despite all the evidence that the killing was nothing less than a cold-blooded execution. In the video that was released, the murderous cop could be heard barking commands to the victim which were all mutually contradictory, and impossible to follow. Some observers pointed to that fact as a damning evidence that Brailsford wanted to create a situation where he could have the reason to pull the trigger. What most people do not know, however, is that this is an official regular tactic that cops are taught in their police academies: bark as many commands as you can within a very short time, while you have your weapon pointed at the “suspect,” with the purpose to confuse them and make them obedient to your will. It was not something that Brailsford came up with on the spot; it is a technique that has been cultivated into him by years of police training. Whether you are aware of this fact or not, whether you like this fact or not, American police is not much different than Communist or Nazi police, and they use the same techniques to subjugate their victims. Both Communist KGB and Nazi SS used it against their prisoners with and astounding success. On a grander scale, the federal and the state governments in the US are using it against the general population; the proliferation of laws and rules and regulations coming out of Washington DC and of the state capitals has two major purposes: first, to make it possible for cronies of government officials to get advantage over their politically less protected competitors, and, second, to make every single individual guilty of some crime or violation, with the purpose of easier psychological control. Ayn Rand called attention to that phenomenon as early as the 1940s: the criminalization of all free activity in one way or another, so that there is an officially “legal” reason to hold every citizen at a gun point. Then again, the rulers can decide who receives grace, and who is punished as an example for everyone else.

The reason why this works is that man, created in the image of God, is first and foremost a moral being. His world is ordered along lines of ethics and justice, not along lines of beauty, harmony, expediency, or anything else. He naturally craves for some moral order, but when he is separated from God, he can’t – and won’t – try to find his moral order in God. He will seek it in the collective. But his moral sense is still there, and he can sense injustice and he will rebel against it when he sees it. In order to prevent this, his moral senses – the only thing that defines his moral character and his very being – must be confused completely. When his adopted or forced-upon source of moral guidance and justice (the state, the collective, police, the camp guards, etc.) issues commands that are self-contradictory and mutually exclusive, he loses his orientation and his sense of order. The result is a person without individual character. He is then easily manipulated to serve the collective.

The third common technique of all collectivist governments is the introduction of collective responsibility.

It is commonly perceived that collective responsibility diminishes personal responsibility. And it is true to a certain extent – namely, as long as the price to pay is low. When the price for that responsibility is high, collective responsibility forces the individuals in the collective to become each other’s taskmasters, basically doing the work of the prison guards for them. Bettelheim gives an example in his book where a unit in the camp was ordered to wash their shoes with water and soap. It was not a regular rule, only a momentary whim of an SS guard, but the implied threat was if one person failed to obey, the whole unit would be punished. Washing the shoes with water and soap left the shoes hard as stone after they dried, and they hurt the feet of the prisoners. The guard never repeated the order again, but for many months after, the prisoners were making sure that everyone complied. They had become their own prison guards, doing the work of their captors.

Collective responsibility has been used since earliest times in the pagan cultures. The modern word “decimation” comes from a form of military punishment in the Roman armies with the same name. When a military unit was guilty of desertion, or retreat, or insubordination, the unit was broken in groups of ten soldiers, and each group drew a lot. The soldier on whom the lot fell was then executed by the other nine, irrespective of his personal guilt or responsibility. This severe punishment for the sins or crimes of others made the soldiers become keepers – or, rather, slave drivers – of each other. The resulting inflexibility in a battle cost the Roman armies a whole lot of casualties, because their soldiers were unwilling to retreat and save their power for another day.

A similar phenomenon can be seen today in America, with the common bias and prejudice against Hispanic immigrants among the general population. While there is no legal expression of collective guilt or responsibility, there is still the public opinion which lumps all Hispanics together for illegal immigration, irrespective of their individual responsibility. This collective finger-pointing at the Hispanic minority has led to the emergence of a phenomenon that might be bizarre, if it wasn’t just another example of what we talked about earlier: the unusual cruelty of some Hispanics to other Hispanics. Those of us who frequently travel and work close to the US-Mexico border know that the majority of the Border Patrol staff is actually Hispanic. And these Hispanic servants of the federal state are much more diligent – and sometimes even cruel – to their fellow Hispanics in enforcing the border laws than the non-Hispanic employees of the Border Patrol. In fact, the phenomenon dates back to the 1960s when the trade unions – mainly Hispanic – of the Marxist activist Cesar Chavez organized vigilante gangs to hunt Mexican immigrant workers (“wetbacks”) and beat them until they are forced to return to Mexico. (Anti-immigration has always been a Marxist policy, even today when supported by conservatives.) Collective guilt, when used to apply pressure on a group, leads to internal mutual distrust and control and supervision within the group. The individual is then forced to comply with the collective, to the exclusion of his own moral convictions or even natural empathy or affinity.

The fourth common tactics of a collectivist government is making people believe that nothing depends on them, their conduct, their moral actions, or even their obedience and allegiance.

Bettelheim gives the example of a group of Czech prisoners. In the first couple of months, they were separated from the Jewish population of the camp as “more noble.” They were given better rations, and they were not taken to job sites as the Jews. In a few weeks, however, the whole group was moved to the worst buildings in the camp, and then taken to work in the stone quarry, given the worst jobs where the danger of lethal accidents was the highest. Suddenly, without any warning, without any reason why. Then, in a few weeks, they were returned to their more comfortable quarters and were spared from heavy work. Then again they were moved to the worst building and taken to the quarry. Meanwhile, individuals were either rewarded or punished based on the whims of their guards and taskmasters. No one could say if they would receive a reward or a punishment at the end of the day, no matter how they performed during the day. Their daily and weekly regime was one of a total disconnect between their conduct or performance and the reward and punishment system administered to them. Within several months, the group was turned into a bunch of psychological cripples who could barely remember their names; for all practical purposes, they were no different than animals. The Jews in the same camp who were consistently abused for just being Jews, remained of stronger psychological condition: they at least knew why they were treated that way.

Part of man’s nature as a moral being is his propensity to view his own life and history as a string of sanctions for his moral conduct. This concept of predictable sanctions is a fundamental Biblical doctrine (see Deut. 28). In addition to it being an integral part of Biblical theology – or following from it – it is also part of our everyday life. Such concepts as entrepreneurship, education, upbringing, social order, science and technology, are all based on the concept of predictable sanctions – or results – from our actions. It is nothing less than the concept of judgment applied to our everyday life. And the concept of predictable judgment in the world inevitably leads us to the concept of a Cosmic Judge who directs history and will eventually judge history. If such concept is to be exterminated, then the people in the collective need to be taught that judgment is never predictable but always chaotic and by chance. As in the evolutionary theory.

The fifth common technique was to make people refuse to see and acknowledge injustice.

Bettelheim describes the following example: An SS guard is beating a prisoner. A group of inmates is marching by, and as they get close, everyone turns their head in the opposite direction to demonstrate that they have learned their lesson to never notice what they are not supposed to notice. The guard yells, “Good job!”, for their compliance.

That technique was especially useful for destroying the souls of the people with their own guilt. By remaining silent, they were made, in a way, accomplices in the injustice they were refusing to notice. Other psychologists note the fact that survivors of the Holocaust were carrying the sense of personal guilt for many years after the war, and that for only one or two instances in which they were forced to “not see” injustice done to other people. Many years after the war, these people were trying to cope with the trauma of being forced to not raise their voice in defense of the weak and oppressed. During the war, of course, this guilt was used to manipulate them into submission. Once you become an accomplice by your silence, you have very little strength left for any resistance.

But don’t make the mistake to think that such technique was limited to the officially totalitarian regimes of the last century. The same technique is applied to our own police officers today. Behind the thin blue line that many conservatives imagine today, there is, within police circles, a thick blue wall or fog of silence, where cops are expected to remain silent when their own colleagues commit crimes and injustice. This week was the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago cop who shot the 16-year-old Laquan McDonald in the back and killed. The jury found Van Dyke guilty of murder – unusual for a country where almost every cop gets away with such an act. What is more important, however, is that Van Dyke wasn’t alone when he committed the murder. He was surrounded by at least a dozen of his fellow officers. Despite the fact that the victim never exhibited any aggressive behavior, not a single one of these other officers did anything to prevent the murder. They just let it happen, and made no effort to stop it. The situation is the same everywhere: the supposedly “good” cops always just sit and watch when their colleagues commit crimes. They never try to stop them. Why?

Because the same policy of “never see or acknowledge injustice” is inculcated in police officers from the very start of their police career. The few cops who have dared stop other cops from committing crimes usually become victims of internal revenge; think Serpico. Others are simply fired. In 2006, Cariol Horne, of the Buffalo PD, tried to stop her colleague Gregory Kwiatkowsky from choking a handcuffed man. Kwiatkowsky then punched her in the face for her daring move. And later, she was fired from the Buffalo PD after 19 years on the force, just a year before she could get her pension. Her violation? She dared notice and acknowledge that injustice was committed by a fellow cop, and tried to do something about it. There are dozens of such examples across the country. This is why those good cops never materialize when you need them to stop other cops from committing crimes: because the same collectivist tactics is at play.

Once a person is trained to not notice injustice, they then develop a new insensitivity to injustice. From there, the step is very small to the sixth common technique of all collectivist governments: make people transgress all their moral boundaries and commit injustice themselves.

Bettelheim describes the following situation: An SS guard commanded two Jewish inmates to lie in a ditch, and then commanded a Polish inmate to use his shovel to bury them alive. The polish inmate refused. The guard started beating the Polish inmate, but he still refused to do it. Then the guard commanded the Pole to lie in the ditch and told the Jews to bury him alive. The Jews, however, complied, and started throwing dirt on the Pole. Right before they were about to cover his head, the SS guard stopped them, ordered the Pole out of the ditch and the Jews back in the ditch, and again ordered the Polish inmate to bury them. This time he complied. Both Jews were buried and died.

This requirement that a person breaks all his internal moral boundaries is typical for the gang structures and the mafia. Committing a crime – usually some senseless murder – is part of the initiation ritual in many gangs. It is nothing less than a modern form of human sacrifice. As R.J. Rushdoony points out, Molech the god of the Phoenicians was not a spiritual being but an impersonation of the centralized state. (Molech means simply “king.”) The sacrifice of infants – which requires the parents to break all their internal boundaries of morality and empathy and love – was not a magical ritual but a pledge of allegiance to the community of the city. Adults who were capable of sentencing their own child to the flames are truly capable of being committed to the collective of the state, and thus were the perfect statist material. Anyone who has crossed that internal border would be capable of crossing any other ethical border when commanded by his superiors. For a man to become perfectly obedient to other men, he needs to become the perfect rebel against God.

Knowing these techniques is crucial for the modern Christian. Not so much because we want to remember the gory details of the past; but because, in one form or another collectivism continues raising its ugly head today, trying to brainwash individuals and lead them astray. Whether collectivism in the state, or collectivism in the church, or collectivism in the family, we are still fighting the same beast that is trying to control the actions of every individual (Revelation 13:17). As Christians, we ought to be capable of discerning that spirit and its manifestation in our society, and actively work to purge our society of it.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. It is not an easy book to read; at times, it is harder than Solzhenitsyn’s GULag Archipelago. In addition to it, I will recommend watching a movie: The Bourne Identity. Why do I recommend that movie? Because it has a very important underlying philosophical theme, namely, that even when a man is so deeply conditioned through technological manipulation to become the perfect obedient collectivist machine, he still has his moral senses, and can still triumph over all collectivism. It is a good movie in this regard, I think.

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Welcome to Episode 75 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about a characteristic of many modern governments. And when I say “governments,” I don’t just mean “civil government.” I mean all governments, including family and church. And other governments as well, like school and political organizations and charities and missions and even some private businesses as well. (Although, because of the nature of the case, private businesses who consistently have this problem seldom survive in the long-run.) It is a characteristic that we seldom notice, given that our minds have been so conditioned to accept it as normative; we only sometimes complain about it without actually realizing the real nature of the problem. Which is strange, because, as you all will see, it is a characteristic that is deeply irrational and should be immediately recognized for what it is; it is only the fact that we have been brainwashed that prevents us from seeing it clearly. A few writers in history have seen it clearly and have exposed it; and yet, the vast majority of us still consider it something normal and natural, even when we are the ones suffering under its weight.

This characteristic of modern governments has been most prominently on display under the so-called “ideological” regimes of the last century – fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, and Communism in Eastern Europe and East Asia – and a few writers have pointed it out, among whom Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich, Eugene Lyons, George Kennan, and a number of writers less known to the American reading public. George Kennan is a name that the listeners of Axe to the Root should remember: he was the author of the Long Telegram of which I talked in one of our previous episodes, an outstanding US diplomat who had a deep knowledge of Communism and the motives behind the actions of Communist leaders. However, the author I want to invoke to help us today in our understanding is not from a century ago but from two centuries ago, the first half of the 1800s; and his observations came not from Nazi Germany or Communist Eastern Europe, but from Russia of the Czars. The author’s name is Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine, a French nobleman born only a few months after the beginning of the French Revolution who lived most of his productive life in Napoleonic France and then under the Bourbon restoration. De Custine wrote and published a book, Russia in 1839, which, to this day, remains one of the most important eye witness accounts on Russia of the Czars written by a Western observer. George Kennan himself, as a student of Eastern Europe and especially of Russia and its politics, considered it important enough to publish a special review of de Custine’s book in 1971. During the early decades of the Cold War, the book was especially popular among Western diplomats working in the Soviet Union, because it was believed that de Custine’s insight into the collective psychology of the Russian people and their government was of a great value in understanding the Soviet Union. Soviet critics at the time claimed that this insight did not apply to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. But the fact was, the very leader of the Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, officially banned the book in Soviet Russia, and the book remained banned throughout Stalin’s rule, until 1956. If a book like that was banned by both the Czarist and the Communist governments, at least two things are clear: first, there was not much difference between the psychologies of the two regimes, and, second, the book did hit a nerve for both regimes, and therefore was valuable for understanding both Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union.

Before we move to the book and to the insights in it, a little pre-history of it and of the life of its author is needed. Astolphe de Custine came from a politically active and illustrious family. His grandfather, Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine, was 8-year-old when he started his military career in the French Royal in the War of Austrian Succession in Germany. By the age of 18, he was a captain of the dragoons. Despite his impressive aristocratic pedigree (the de Custine family of Lorraine goes back to the 13th century, before The Hundred-Years War, when their native Lorraine was still a duchy within the Holy Roman Empire), Adam Philippe (the grandfather) developed strong liberal and anti-monarchical views. These views made him, in 1780, join the Special Expedition of Count Rochambeau of 5,500 French soldiers to America to help the American Revolution. There Adam Philippe fought with distinction and was praised by Rochambeau himself; he fought till the very end of the war and was present with George Washington at the Siege of Yorktown. He also received special individual recognition from the US government. When he returned to France, he was made the governor of Toulon, a fortress on the Mediterranean coast of France. When the Estates-General were summoned, he was elected to represent the city of Metz in his native Lorraine. Despite being part of the nobility, Adam Philippe joined the Third Estate in voting for a new, liberal Constitution. As the French Revolution progressed, he joined the Revolutionary Army and was soon assigned to train, equip, and lead the new army of volunteers. He did it successfully, and in the wars of the Revolutionary France was appointed the commander-in-chief of the Army of the North. However, as happened with many fervent revolutionary leaders in the revolutionary terror, he was accused of treason and conspiring with the enemy, convicted on trumped up charges, and promptly guillotined.

His son, and Astolphe’s father, Renaud-Louis-Philippe-Francois de Custine, followed in his father’s footsteps, took military commissions with the Revolutionary army under the command of his father, and later took on diplomatic work for the French Republic. But when his father was taken to court, Renaud defended his father’s character which earned him the ire of the prosecutors. He was subsequently also brought on charges, convicted and guillotined. His wife, the beautiful and intelligent Delphine de Custine, was also arrested, but for some reason she was spared.

Young Astolphe thus grew in an atmosphere of constant fear for the life of his family. His mother did everything she could to preserve the family’s fortunes in the chaotic times of the French Republic and the Napoleonic Empire. She arranged a marriage for her son, but his bride died a year after the marriage. The family was able to breathe freely again only after the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons in France, in 1814. The young Astolphe became the heir of a generous annual income, and his excellent education opened for him the doors of the French diplomatic corps. Unfortunately, an accident in 1824 revealed a secret he had always had: that he was a sodomite. From that moment, he lost all his chances for a diplomatic career, even though he still had his income and estates.

He took to writing, believing that it was his calling in life. Unfortunately, he was a mediocre writer, so at the beginning, nothing came out of it. But in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville published his Democracy in America. It was an immediate success; and it also made popular a new genre: political travel writing. By 1835, de Custine had already been planning a trip to Russia. He now had a specific purpose for that trip: to write a political description of the other gigantic country, on the other pole of the European civilization. De Tocqueville took on the western border of the European civilization. De Custine decided to take on the eastern one.

He also had a personal reason to do it. Given the history of the family, his grandfather and father being consumed in conflagration of the very liberal and democratic revolution they served, Astolphe de Custine had developed a deep hatred to everything that was liberal, democratic, egalitarian, republican, etc. Contrary to his father’s and his grandfather’s views, de Custine considered absolute monarchy and an aristocratic caste society to be the best form of social and political organization. It gave order and provided security for everyone. Chaos was prevented and prosperity established under an absolute monarchy. Of all European nations, Russia was the last great stronghold of absolute monarchy and aristocratic caste system. So de Custine’s objective was to explore it and to write a political travel writing which would do for monarchy what de Tocqueville did for democracy: a political eulogy which would convince his readers to adopt his political views. That’s the mindset with which he set out for Russia.

And, boy, was he disappointed.

What he saw made him turn his views 180 degrees. Russia of the Czars was not the paradise on earth he expected, even if his Russian hosts tried desperately to present to him Russia’s best face. Not only wasn’t it a paradise, it was hell on earth; he came to the conclusion that while in France, and in Europe in general, any tyranny is only a transitional state, in Russia, it is a permanent way of life. (A sentiment confirmed a century later by Winston Churchill.) Behind the mediocre writing skills, de Custine possessed a deep discerning mind of people’s motives and fears. He could see through the smoke screen and the ostentatious glow of the Russian nobility, to the real relationships of power and submission in the society, and the twisted psychology undergirding them. In short, by the time de Custine got to collect all his thoughts and notes in a book, he was a completed liberal (in the European sense of the word) and anti-authoritarian.

I wish I had the time to expound on all his insights, but I will leave it to y’all to read his book (it’s free online in French and there is an English translation which, unfortunately, is not free). Some of them are general for all tyrannies, and those are that are the most relevant to us today. Some are apparently characteristic to Russia and its people – although, to be honest, we don’t know how much of what is considered “national” character or culture was in fact characteristics of tyranny in general which has sunk deep into the character of a nation that has never known anything else but tyranny. Either way, the book is worth reading, even if you have to endure the boring style.

The insight I want to take from it in this episode was given early in the book, in chapter 7, and it came to de Custine when he was on a ship approaching the port of Saint Petersburg. On his way to the Russian capital, his ship sailed through the Baltic Sea all the way from Denmark. At the time, the Baltic Sea was a dead sea in terms of economic development and therefore maritime commerce; at least compared to the busy waters around England and France and the Mediterranean, or the rivers of Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. There were no large significant developed cities on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and as far as a traveler could see from a ship, the shores were simply flat marshes with no civilized life on them. De Custine called it a “dessert of water.” The Russian Empire had very little commerce going through the Baltic Sea; in fact, at the time, despite its aspiration to fit into the European cultural and economic life, most of Russia’s international commerce was with Turkey and Persia, through the large rivers Volga, Don, and Dnieper. (Not to mention that that commerce was of a very insignificant volume. Russia has never had an economy to match its geographical size. Even today, Russia’s GDP is less than the GDP of Texas and is comparable to the GDP of the Houston-Corpus-Beaumont industrial region.) In addition, the Baltic Sea is frozen or otherwise closed to navigation six months of the year. The only two large nations bordering the Baltic – Sweden and Prussia – kept no large maritime forces there; there wasn’t anything significant to protect. From a military point of view, there was nothing in the Baltic Sea that would be of any strategic importance to require the presence of a large Navy.

And yet, as his ship was approaching Kronstadt, an island fortress in the bay of Saint Petersburg and a base of the Russian Navy, he was presented with what he called a “forest of masts” of military ships anchored at the base or conducting small scale maneuvers in the small bay. There was no merchant marine in sight to match the abundance of fully equipped and manned military ships, only a few boats sailed by what he called “sailors dirty as Eskimos.” (Racial stereotypes were common for Europe affected by the Enlightenment.) Kronstadt – the name meaning City of the Crown – had been built not only into a fully operation naval base, it also had a large naval academy producing a large number of naval officers every year, whose whole career was expected to serve on those same ships – and the ships were never expected to engage in any meaningful battle, or any battle at all, just conduct maneuvers in the empty waters of the Baltic Sea during the summer, and in the closed space of the Gulf of Finland during the winter. Only very few ever went on a mission beyond the Danish Straits, and such missions have always been commanded by foreigners, mainly Danish, German, or Dutch; the Russian government knew well the low level of professional skill of its own officers and did not trust them with long-range operations. The Navy was not meant to achieve any military objectives at all. There weren’t any such for Russia, not on strategic level, at least.

So what was the purpose then of the large navy the Russian Czar Nicholas I had built in St. Petersburg? Why the vast expense of money, resources, human capital, and time?

De Custine figured it out immediately, even as he was writing his notes on the ship that was taking him past the forest of masts to the Russian capital: the Russian Navy was meant to be Czar Nicholas I’s set of toys. It was a game to him. Or, even worse, it was for show-off. It made him feel equal to the European monarchs. The kings of England, France, Spain, Denmark, all had their large navies. Even the Netherlands had a navy when it was still a republic of separate provinces, when Peter the Great visited it in the early 1700s; and in the 1830s, even after the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars and the breakaway of Belgium, king William I of the Netherlands still commanded a significant navy for his small kingdom. So if these kings had their splendid navies, why should the Emperor of Russia lag behind? Wasn’t he entitled to have his own navy to play with, and show off to visitors? Who cares if 90% of his subjects lived in abject poverty compared to the citizens of the European monarchies at the time; not to mention the still existing relations of feudal serfdom and even slavery? Who cares if, in 1839, at a time when the European nations were undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization of their economies and a subsequent rise in wages and living standards, the Russian czarist government hadn’t even paid yet its debts to its soldiers who fought to defeat Napoleon 27 years earlier, in 1812? The Western powers not only had good strategic reasons to have their navies; they also had the economies to underwrite the costs for building and maintaining them without making them a drag on their economies. Russia had neither the strategic reasons for such a large navy, and neither did it have the economic means to sustain it without gigantic sacrifices forced on its population. But then, who cares about the population? After all, its very capital at the time, Saint Petersburg, was built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of peasants forcefully plucked out of their homes and their villages, to satisfy the desire of one mad man, Peter the Great, of having his capital built in the tundra-like wilderness of the Russian north. Russia had the history of such sacrifices forced on its population, and its rulers had the habit of disregarding the plight of their subjects. Nothing new under the sun, right?

(As a side note, de Custine’s assessment of the uselessness of the Russian fleet proved to be prophetic. Over the next 80 years, until the fall of the Russian monarchy, the Russian fleet never engaged any other nation in a long term naval war, nor had any significant – from a strategic perspective – naval battles that would justify the expenses. For this period, the only two wars that saw a massive fleet engagement were the Crimean War of 1856 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and both ended in defeat and utter devastation for the Russian fleet. We will talk about the Russo-Japanese War and the failure of racial theories in a future episode. During WWI, despite the large scale of the war, Russian ships remained stuck in their harbors, or preferred to bombard undefended civilian areas instead of engaging in combat; in St. Petersburg, it was the Communist-leaning crews of those berthed ships that were the strike force of the Bolshevik revolution. The Soviet Union continued the legacy of maintaining many ships for no use. In WWII, the Communist government simply ordered the crews to leave the ships, armed them, and send them to fight land battles. For most of Russia’s history, its navy was just a practically useless toy; and it has always been rarely combat-worthy. Our listeners may remember the Russian involvement in the conflict in Syria last year, sending Russia’s last remaining aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov. Well, I was on that ship for a short time in the summer of 1990, when it was still named Tbilisi, a few months before it was renamed to its present name. Even then, it was considered badly out-of-date in terms of technology; today, it is no better than an antique item. Russia has always had a navy just to show off; it was never expected to be of any worth in battle.)

But de Custine’s insight went beyond the particular issues of the Russian government’s psychology; it applied to all tyrannies and all authoritarian regimes. His conclusion was this: Tyrannies always demand of their populations – under slogans like “loyalty” and “patriotism” and “faithfulness” and others – enormous sacrifices for things and activities that produce nothing of real value, except for ostentatious display. After so much effort and expenses, the practical results will be minimal; the poor people drafted into such undertakings, or having to pay in taxes and dues for them, will receive no improvement of their lot. But the tyrannies who lord over them will have their satisfaction that they have demonstrated some greatness, built upon human suffering and deprivation and even deaths. Sacrifices for trifles, that’s the common factor of all tyrants.

And it wasn’t limited to Russia. Pre-revolutionary France was known for the ostentatious displays of its kings built on great sacrifices of its people. British travelers in the 18th century describe women and children in France begging for a piece of bread along the roads, in a country whose climate was immeasurably more favorable to growing foods than that of Britain; meanwhile, in the midst of chronic starvation for a significant part of the population of France, the palaces and the lifestyle of its kings were immeasurably more opulent than those of their English counterparts. The situation was similar in Germany where more than three hundred principalities whose princes were competing to show themselves rich and prosperous,  or military intimidating, on the backs of their subjects. King Frederick William I of Prussia, for instance, had an obsession with tall soldiers, so he created a special regiment for soldiers that were minimum 6’2” tall. He searched his realm to find every single male with such enormous height for his time, and then, when he couldn’t find more, he turned to other monarchs and paid significant amounts of money for any such soldier sent to him; or sent out emissaries to search for such tall men and impress them into service by any means necessary, including force and fraud. One of his tallest soldiers, the Irishman James Kirkland (7’2) was signed in using false promises. His tallest ever may have been the Finn Daniel Cajanus, whose height was between 7’8” and a little over 8’ tall. Most of these men were unfit for battle because of their gigantism, and the regiment never saw a single battle in its 130 years of history. But Frederick William I personally drilled them and trained them every day, and even had them march through his bedroom when he was on his sickbed. Visiting foreign dignitaries were made to watch the regiment march in formation as part of their visit; the king was trying to impress them. Life in the regiment was so dull and purposeless that many of the soldiers tried to desert or even committed suicide. But hey, the king had his toy to play with, right, and nothing else mattered. And he wasn’t the only monarch with such bizarre obsessions.

The collectivist ideologies that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, their claims to scientific rationality notwithstanding, continued the same practices as soon as they came to power in the 1920s and the 1930s. After all, de Custine’s observations applied to all tyrannies, and collectivism, with its disregard for the individual, can’t produce anything but tyranny. The Soviet Union started building its gigantic monuments and industrial plants almost immediately after the Civil War was over. With three-quarters of the population still on the brink of starvation, re-directing investments towards heavy industry and energy only meant that the famine of war will continue in peacetime. And it did. Countless millions died of starvation in the 1930s, while workers on the gigantic industrial projects of Stalin’s Russia lived and worked in horrible conditions. (And some projects were built political prisoners who were expendable to the regime anyway and died by the tens of thousands on the job sites.) After WWII, the same thing happened: the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were more concerned with building gigantic statues and monuments than with solving the problem of food production and housing. Only one of those gigantic statues, Motherland Calls in Volgograd, commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad, took 5,500 tons of concrete, 2,400 tons of wrought iron, 12 tons of stainless steel and even 2 tons of titanium to build, all in a time when the average housing space for a family of three in the city of Volgograd was 200 sqft and the daily food rations were barely above the limit of 2,500 calories needed for a person to survive. Nazi Germany also had a large program of monument building in a time of severe austerity, not to mention the enormous party rallies and military parades where hundreds of thousands of people were required to march and demonstrate the power of the Nazi Party and its ideology. Speaking of military parades, in the last 60 years, that has been the favorite propaganda device of petty dictators around the world, from North Korea to Zimbabwe and Paraguay, and even Putin’s Russia in the last 10 years. In all of these cases, the militaries are barely combat-worthy and are good for little else than terrorizing civilian populations; but, man, the parades are organized like expensive choreographic festivals. Or you can call them Carnivals in military costumes. There is a good reason why Washington DC was built so as to not have a special avenue for military parades, like most European monarchical capitals; such ostentatious display of men in shiny uniforms has always been contrary to the pragmatic and egalitarian original American spirit, informed by the Reformation and its worldview. Trump’s desire to have a military parade only shows the degradation of that spirit to the levels of African or South American dictatorships and of all dictatorships in general: boss those peasants around to make great sacrifices so that some elitist buffoon can show off to other elitist buffoons.

Not only military parades, but real wars can also be – and most often are – a manifestation of this instinct of tyrannies. What is a war if not politicians demanding enormous sacrifices of their populations – and the ultimate sacrifice of their soldiers – for purposes that never serve the ones making the sacrifice? (Remember Lord Farquaad from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”) Trillions of dollars and thousands of Americans lives and limbs later, what’s the tangible benefit of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the taxpayers and the soldiers who underwrite the bill in money and lives? Look at the Social Security Administration: a gigantic expense of bureaucracy for management and enforcement, and how close is it to solving the problems it was supposed to solve? It is actually going in the opposite direction, having a shortage of $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Look at our government school system: another gigantic expense, producing only more illiteracy and ignorance, while private schools and homeschoolers produce a superior product at only a fraction of the cost. How is this possible? The answer was given to us by the Marquis de Custine some 180 years ago: all these government programs and projects and undertakings have the same purpose as the Russian Navy of his time, and that is not to meet real objectives and to solve real problems but to be the toys of the governing class, a show off to the world of how powerful, or how compassionate, or how caring their state apparatus is. It is all a game of show off, and none of it is meant to produce real return on the taxes paid by their subjects. If it seems to you they don’t produce results, it is because they were not meant to produce the results you are expecting. But they do produce the results the government apparatus expects them to produce.

But don’t make the mistake of restricting this rule only to state tyrannies. Tyrannies are found in every human government, and therefore, this characteristic of tyrannies can be found in every human government.

Take the institutional church, for example. Even in Jesus’s times, that characteristic of church tyranny could be seen in the practices of the scribes and the Pharisees, in Matthew 23:4-7:

They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger. But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments. They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and respectful greetings in the market places, and being called Rabbi by men.

And yet, the result of all these burdens is zero, or even negative, as Jesus says in the following verses. These burdens do not lead them into the Kingdom of God, but to the contrary, people are prevented from entering the Kingdom. Useless work and show off for nothing, is what the religion of the Pharisees was.

For centuries, the main struggle within the church was between those who wanted the church stay focused and faithful to its task of serving Christ and those who wanted to turn the church into just another religious temple obsessed with how it shows off to the world. The fight was real as early as the second century AD, even while the Roman persecutions were still raging. Tertullian, one of the finest and purest minds of the Church at the time, had to deal with clerics who considered institutional subjugation more important than true righteousness and justice; thus, demanding of their people efforts and sacrifices that produces no progress in the spiritual growth of the Church. A similar spirit was spreading even among the laymen in the Church: the persecutions and some twisted theology produced the conviction in many people that death in the hands of the persecutors was the most secure way to heaven, so scores of young Christians just turned themselves in to the authorities in the hope that the authorities would kill them and thus make them saints. While their bravery was spectacular, the results for the Church were disastrous; so in many places the church ministers had to declare that deliberate martyrdom is no different than suicide.

Once the church was free of persecutions, another temptation to show off appeared, and that was erecting lavish buildings and turning the simple service to Christ into elaborate liturgies that eventually made sense to no one, and produced no spiritual value, but required gigantic efforts and money. By the time of the Reformation, this had grown into a disease on the face of the Church; Luther’s first disenchantment with the Roman Church was not in 1517 when he posted the 95 Theses but in 1510 when he visited Rome and saw the luxurious life the ecclesiastical hierarchy was living on the tithes and offerings and the indulgences the regular people in Christendom paid to the papacy. And while the expensive extravagance of Rome was not such an issue in itself, the spiritual result of it was not positive at all; in fact, Rome was the most debauched city in Christendom, full of prostitution and other immorality. The Whore City demanded sacrifices from the simple-hearted commonfolk of Christendom only to maintain its opulence, not to serve the purposes of God. Rome was the church equivalent to the Russian Navy of de Custine’s time: designed to project a false magnificence, while serving no practical use at all. And all that on the dime of the hard working Christians of Europe.

But why beat on the Roman Church when we have the same problem with our own Protestant churches today, and even with those who pass for “Reformed” or “conservative, Bible-believing”? On one hand we have gigantic Charismatic mega-churches spending millions of dollars on gigantic buildings and mass activities (not to mention private jets for their celebrities). On the other hand we have “Reformed” ministries who absorb hundreds of millions of dollars every year to run “Reformed” colleges and seminaries and apologetic ministries and conferences and multiple formal debates on the same worn-out topics. And then we have hundreds of mission organizations sending out tens of thousands of missionaries who burn through $2.5 billion every year, in addition to the tens of billions of dollars already spent on churches at home. And what’s the fruit of all this? Insignificant. In the United States, the church has been losing the cultural war – exactly because none of these ministries really had any idea to teach the nation everything Christ has commanded, but only to vaguely “preach the Gospel.” (What “gospel” is it without the Great Commission?) In the final account, we have all these impressive church buildings and seminaries and organizational structures . . . for what? Only to satisfy the lust for notoriety of a few elitist churchmen, while the world around them is abandoned to wickedness and injustice. As I said in “Denethor Ministries,” a previous episode of Axe to the Root, we would have done better to spend all that money on bourbon instead of on ministries; and the results would be better.

The family as a sphere of government is not immune to tyranny, and, as such, is not immune to manifestations of the same instinct. Here, the instinct can go two ways.

On one hand, we have families that deliver their children to the state and to the state institutions of indoctrination. Most parents have no ambitions for their kids, so they just go with the flow, whatever the government schools do with them. Parents with higher aspirations, however, expect and encourage their children to excel in areas that would make Mom and Dad proud; the problem being that such areas of ostensible achievements in the state schools are usually not such as to serve the long-term success of the child. Modern focus is almost entirely on athletics, in an economy where the demand for professional athletes is rather low. At the same time, areas where success is not as glossy and spectacular – like science and engineering – are usually ignored. But it is exactly in those areas that our economy is showing signs of increasing labor shortage: starting from mechanics and technicians and laboratory workers, and going all the way to engineers and programmers and scientists, American companies are resorting more and more to finding employees abroad because they can’t find them at home. I talked about this phenomenon in a previous episode, titled “Science, Engineering, and the Kingdom of God,” and the poor educational choices modern American parents make. Even homeschool parents. In my practice as a math tutor, I have noticed that it is usually immigrant families that pick on that void and are sacrificing to position their kids to take advantage of the real opportunities. American parents are rather concerned with whether their boy makes it to the football team or whether their girl is admitted to the cheerleader or soccer team. These may be a reason for personal pride in the parents, and they require enormous efforts from the children, but they serve nothing in preparing the children for a future of being productive and independent adults.

And while such parents cripple their children from being independent in one way, other families, on the opposite side of the spectrum, cripple their kids in a different way. The tyranny of an ambitious soccer mom whose kids are in the public school is rivaled by the tyranny of a patriarchal father who homeschools his kids, and wants to make them a perfect example for a patriarchal family. So he homeschools them not to prepare them to be independent and productive for God (“a man shall leave his father and mother”), but to mold them into children for life, eternally dependent on him for their living, their having a family, and for their individual purpose in life in general. Daughters are not trained or educated outside the basic tasks of the kitchen and of bearing children; thus, they find themselves helpless later in life should they remain unmarried or are subject to abuse by their husbands. Others are taught that they should stay serving their fathers until they are too old to run the chance of finding husbands or even bearing children. Sons are raised with the legalistic expectation that they should continue in the professional or business footsteps of their fathers, and serve for nothing in their fathers’ businesses. There is nothing wrong with a son who wants to continue the business of his father, but this practice is often made into a religious rule that stifles the true spiritual and professional talents of the sons, should they be different from their fathers’. Just as there are daughters that have been kept at home for years serving their fathers, there are also sons who have worked for their fathers decades into their adulthood, receiving not wages as workers but only allowances, as if they are still immature children. Such examples are way too common, unfortunately, in conservative Christian circles where fathers, and even whole churches, have misunderstood the meaning of the Biblical family and have adopted an erroneous view of its restoration in our society. And in all such examples, the children are made to commit to significant sacrifices, including sacrificing their future in service to God with the talents He has given them, for the maniacal passion of the fathers to demonstrate a “true patriarchal family” to the world. For all practical purposes, such “families” are no different than the Russian Navy de Custine described: the weaker members have to make gigantic efforts and suffer so that the stronger member has his toy to play with.

I am not going to talk about a solution to this problem that is present in every human government. Such solution should be obvious; the removal of tyranny. And for that, we have talked in other episodes, and will continue talking. For now, I will assign for reading the book we have been talking about: Astolphe de Custine, Russia in 1839. The book is rather boring to read because of its literary style; as I said in the beginning, de Custine wasn’t exactly a gifted writer. But he had an incredible insight into the psychology of people and governments. Read the book. You may find that, in your area of government, you have been committing the same sins tyrants commit. And it may open your eyes to the tyranny of our own governments today, church and state.

In your prayer and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation of the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing Christian books that apply the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 74 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 40 minutes (a little bit longer, yes) we will talk about suffrage. You know, voting. Political voting, to be precise, but we may also touch the issue of church voting as well. Voting seems to be en vogue these days, and a lot of social and political energy, not to mention finances (you may call them distilled social energy, if you want) is devoted to discussing voting, or to organizing voting, or making voting serve certain political goals and purposes. It’s a big deal in America; and, to be honest, I am rather excited about it, given my own personal history. Having grown up in a country under a Communist regime, I remember times when people were obligated to vote, and there was only one option on the ballot. (I mean, in theory, you could always write in a second candidate, but the consequences wouldn’t be nice.) Of course, at a closer look, at the most levels of the American political system as it is today, you still have only one candidate – or, to be precise, one and the same policy represented by several names, some Republican, some Democrat. Still, as it sometimes happens, the American system does allow an honest man to get through the sift and actually make a difference – like Ron Paul, for example. So, some good can come out of that system, obviously – well, at least compared to the system in Communist countries. (Although, I am not sure how relevant such comparison can be.) Either way, voting – and especially political voting – is in the focus of many people these days. And in the focus of Christian preachers, as well, for different reasons.

Among these preachers, I have encountered numerous different theories what the Bible supposedly says about voting. Some, like John MacArthur, see all political activity as a waste of time at best, or, as “placing cultural and social issues above spiritual issues” (direct quote) at worst. (Because, you know, cultural and spiritual issues can’t be spiritual issues. As my friend, the abolitionist Todd Bullis, quipped, “if it was legal to murder gray-haired old men, you bet he’d be more balanced, don’t you think?”) Others – and that’s the majority of them – have simply adopted the modern secularist propaganda of representative republic or democracy or whatever, and see voting as a symbol of liberty in an America specially blessed by God. (She is specially blessed, but voting is not necessarily a token of it, I would say.) Still others come up with different theories about the nature of voting of the correct Biblical patterns of voting, many of them serving specific theological theories that such pastors have; some of these theories deserving serious consideration, others so outlandishly bizarre that one wonders how men of common sense and high intelligence could even come up with them.

Recently, I was asked to comment on one of those theories about suffrage, a theory that comes out of a movement that emerged in the last several decades, the so-called “Biblical” patriarchy. I have talked about patriarchy before, and I have explained why it can’t be anymore “Biblical” than Hinduism or Marxism can be Biblical; So I am not going to repeat myself here. Besides, as I have said before, patriarchalism in the Reformed churches reached its culmination a few years ago and has been going down the drain ever since, dragged by multiple scandals of abuse, as well as by revolt by children – and especially daughters – who have grown up under that ideological system.

Some of its teachings are still with us, however. And one of them is its teaching on suffrage, political and ecclesiastical. Specifically, that women should not vote.

Women’s suffrage has been in the cross hairs of almost every single patriarchalist speaker or leader, ever since patriarchalism raised its head again the evangelical and Reformed churches in America. I first heard of this doctrine back in the 1990s, and continued hearing of it until a few years ago when the whole patriarchalist movement started disintegrating under its own weight. Given that almost all of them have spoken against women’s suffrage, I won’t have the time to cover all of their writings in this episode. I will take on, however, a booklet that summarizes all these patriarchalist views on women’s suffrage: Universal Suffrage: A History and Analysis of Voting in the Church and Society, by Phillip Kayser, a pastor of a Presbyterian church in Omaha Nebraska. The booklet can be found on his online library, KayserCommentary.com. The reason I have to take on just a small booklet is because it is the most concise rendering of the patriarchalist position against women’s suffrage; there is no comprehensive treatment on this topic, and the majority of the criticisms against women’s suffrage are excerpts from sermons and lectures; and most of them are rather chaotic when it comes to exposition. Kayser’s booklet, however, is well-ordered, and the exposition is one straight logical construct from beginning to end. (Even if the arguments in its are rather deficient, as we will see shortly.) So it is that booklet that I will use to show why women’s suffrage in our day is not anti-Biblical or anti-Christian, and in fact, should be promoted and defended by the Church in our time, not as necessarily a “spiritual and Biblical necessity,” but as an expression of applied redemptive justice in times of temporary darkness.

Pastor Kayser has three main arguments against women’s suffrage. I will just mention the first two in passim and show why they are deficient, and then I will focus on his third argument, which I believe is the most substantial argument; and it is also the argument that clearly shows that both Kayser and the rest of the patriarchy movement have failed to think covenantally and to apply the Biblical standards of the Dominion Mandate to our modern times in a way that would honor the justice of the Law of God. But more about this later.

His first argument against women’s suffrage is an argument from history. He points to the fact that voting used to be restricted by several factors, and in fact, not only women, but also slaves, people of color in general, men without property, and other categories of citizens were excluded from voting. Kayser appeals to the fact that voting will always be restricted; and therefore, we shouldn’t be so surprised if he says that women shouldn’t vote.

That argument from history, of course, is fallacious on its own. Before we turn to historical precedents to refute or support some modern idea or ideology, we need to make sure several things are in place. The people who were behind those historical precedents, were they motivated by the Word of God, or were they motivated by paganism that has remained in Christendom? Was the historical situation analogical to the modern situation? (As we will see, it wasn’t.) Do we interpret the precedents based on the mindset and expectations of the contemporaries, or are we introducing our modern bias? Etc., etc., etc. History doesn’t teach us anything of value before we have a system of values to apply to history. Just because someone did something in the past doesn’t mean it is necessarily good. Time doesn’t sanctify anything.

His second argument is one of the most illogical arguments I have ever read in a Christian book: He says that women’s vote “undermines family role in the church,” and, I would add, by implication, in the state. Unfortunately, Kayser has omitted giving the reasoning behind this claim; he doesn’t explain how in the world the family’s role is undermined if the family can cast two votes instead of one. He just makes the claim and leaves it there, without any explanation why. I spent some time trying to figure out his logic, and I wasn’t able to come to any conclusion. How is my family’s role undermined if my wife can cast a second vote for my family, if we are counted as two votes instead of one? How is two votes less than one vote?

When you dig deeper, the logic becomes even more bizarre. A functional and harmonious family where the husband and the wife are in perfect agreement gets one vote. And then a dysfunctional family where the husband and the wife don’t agree on anything, including principles of church and civil government, also gets one vote. So dysfunctional families are equally represented as harmonious families, and that strengthens the family’s role??? And if the husband in that dysfunctional family is a scoundrel, he gets to be represented while his righteous wife gets no representation? And that strengthens the family’s role? Under universal suffrage, a harmonious family gets two votes, while a dysfunctional family gets zero votes (wife’s vote would cancel her husband’s vote). While under Kayser’s proposal, dysfunctional families are actually encouraged by giving them the same representation as harmonious families. Of what I see, logically, Kayser’s proposal only subsidizes broken families, ecclesiastically and politically. How is he not capable of seeing that?

But it gets even worse. Explain this, if you can: a widow with children has zero votes, while a single man without a family has one vote. How does this strengthen the family’s role? (Well, Kayser may want to argue that only family men should be eligible to vote, but then he would have to exclude Jesus, Paul, and Timothy from being eligible to vote in church elections.) But that’s not the worst part. Listen to this: If two men live together in a “household,” such “household” would have two votes, while a normal family would have only one vote, and a widow with children would have zero votes. (The men don’t have to be in an illicit sodomite relationship, just living as single roommates who share a house.  Although, if they did have such illicit relationship, they would be protected against prosecution under the Law of God, as long as they kept it secret.) So by what logic does Kayser claim that women’s vote undermines the role of the family? Looks to me that, contrary to his beliefs, it is his proposal that would undermine the role of Biblical, solid, harmonious families, and would give disproportional representation to non-families, or even to perverts. He never makes the effort to explore the ramifications of what he said; but those ramifications show that his proposal would rather diminish the role of the Biblical family rather than strengthen it. The only possible logical explanation for Kayser’s position is that he doesn’t really believe that the wife is a legitimate part of the family; he only sees her as an external addendum who has no lawful share of her own in the family, and therefore cannot represent the family as a family. A single man, still being a man, is a family. A widow with children is not a family. Thus, the family is identified with the man, and the woman is just an outsider, all her life. Perhaps Kayser didn’t mean to say this, but this is the only logical conclusion from his position.

His third argument is the most important of the three: namely, that the Bible never mentions women’s voting. Kayser’s claim is that this is because voting is an issue of “leadership” (the perennial excuse of all tyrannies, by the way), and since women are not allowed to “have leadership or authority over men,” therefore women are not allowed to vote. He misses the fact that Deborah was a mother in Israel (clearly a position of authority), and that Jesus Himself mentioned that the Queen of the South will be at the judgment of a whole generation of men, thus exercising authority over them (Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:31). From other writings, Kayser’s excuse about Debora is that her rise was for the shame of the men in Israel who failed in their leadership – but such claim is extra-Biblical, given that no verse in the Bible supports it. And even if he could make that claim about Deborah, what about the Queen of the South? Was Jesus confused about “gender roles”?

The artificial, non-Biblical obsession with “leadership” and submission aside, however, Kayser’s main problem with his argument is this: While it is true that women’s suffrage is not mentioned in the Bible, this is still not an argument to bar women from voting today. Why? Because – and this is where Kayser has failed to do his diligence and analyze the topic comprehensively – not only is women’s voting not mentioned in the Bible, but our whole modern system of voting is not mentioned in the Bible. In order for him to use the silence of the Bible and apply it to modern political or church voting, he needs to first prove that modern voting is, indeed, in the Bible, and therefore whatever applied to Biblical voting, must apply to our modern voting today, in church and state. But he never makes such effort. He just makes conclusions from linear, direct analogies between things that are not the same, and not even close to being the same. And in order to understand where he has failed to do his homework, we need to understand the nature of the modern political system and compare it to the Biblical political system. We will have to do that in the context of the Dominion Covenant, and understand the underlying covenantal issues at stake in the modern political system and the nature of voting, and only then decide whether women’s suffrage in our day is Biblically justified. We want to avoid making superficial analogies, as Kayser did, because such superficial analogies may help us feel good about our supposedly “Biblical” ideas, but in reality, may actually take us far away from the worldview of the Bible.

Where do we start our analysis? From the Dominion Mandate, of course.

As we as Christian Reconstructionists should know from our application of Covenant Theology, modern “spiritualized” pulpit Christianity notwithstanding, the Biblical covenant was economic, from the very beginning. We like to make it all spiritual and diminish and denigrate the economic aspects of it. The early Reformed theologians added somewhat to the confusion by giving a super-spiritualized name to that original covenant, “covenant of works” (as in salvation is through works). But as the Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder mentioned, a better name for that original covenant would be a Covenant of Work: God commanded man to work, to take dominion over the earth and subdue it, which means, make it productive for the purposes of an expanding mankind. It is not that that task was not spiritual: in fact, that was the spiritual task given to man in the Garden, and it will always remain the most spiritual task ever given to man: to improve the economic value of the resources given to him. The ethical-judicial restraints God placed in the Garden were not meant to be separate from that spiritual-economic task; they were supposed to protect man in his ability to take dominion over the earth. Man was created to take dominion, that is, to work, and the command to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was meant to keep man capable of fulfilling his task of work.

When we closely examine that command – to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – we notice that it was actually a command concerning property boundaries. It was about lawful and unlawful use of resources. “From any tree of the Garden you may eat freely, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” As Gary North pointed out in several places in his economic commentary on the Bible, the definition of property rights can be boiled down a simple right: the right to exclude other people from the use of certain resources. When God legally excluded man from using the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this was an exercise of property rights. But this was not the only example of property rights in the creation account. There is one more: And that was Adam’s property rights. When God put him in the garden, He gave Adam two task: to serve the garden (cultivate it) and to protect the garden. The word for “protect” here means to “establish a defensive perimeter” around the garden. Just like God exercised His property rights over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by barring others from using it, Adam was supposed to exercise his property rights over the garden by barring God’s enemies from using it.

Property rights, therefore, are a foundational aspect of dominion in general, and of the Dominion Mandate in particular. One can’t exercise dominion without property rights. And those property rights need to be established under a divine charter: they must be sacred so that no earthly power can have a legitimate claim over them, or, in other words, any kind of resistance and rebellion would be morally justified in case an earthly power decides to touch them. As I have argued before, contrary to von Mises who says that property is not sacred (mainly because there is nothing sacred to him), property rights must be sacred and must be inviolable by any external human agency, except in the case of crime. Dominion without property rights is impossible to even define theoretically, let alone apply in practice.

But there is more to the relationship between dominion and property rights. It is not only that dominion is impossible without property rights; it is also that wherever property rights are granted, dominion under God is delegated as an ethical imperative. To exercise dominion, you need property rights; but once you are granted those property rights, you can’t escape the task of dominion; it becomes the standard by which you are judged. Jesus’s parable of the talents in Matt. 25:14-30 (and the corresponding passage in Luke 19:12-27) is very clear about it. The master (Jesus Himself) grants ownership of certain resources, and He expects a return on them. If such return is not produced, the person is judged for his failure to produce even the slightest return, equal to the general interest on bank loans. Without the resources given, dominion can’t be achieved; but once they are given, each servant is under judgment for what he has produced with those resources. So we can clearly declare that a person is as much empowered and responsible for dominion as is the value of resources they are given by God. The more property you are given, the more dominion responsibility is placed on your shoulders. Under the Biblical Law, your property rights are sacred (they come from God and can’t be lawfully violated by a human agency) but they come with a divine mandate.

Once we have understood this, the next question is: Can women own property? Does the Bible allow women to exercise property rights? Is there any difference in the Bible between men exercising property rights and women exercising property rights?

The importance of this question should not be underestimated; it is actually central to understanding the nature of the family, and the functions of the two spouses in the Dominion Mandate. If the wife is not permitted to have property, and all the property of the family belongs only to the husband, and property rights are exercised only by the husband, then the logical conclusion from this would be that the wife is not charged with the task of dominion. At best, she is only a servant to her husband, an addendum to his dominion ministry in whatever area of life. If she has any dominion functions, they would be second-rate and derivative, not any better than the dominion functions of domesticated animals. She doesn’t have her own place in the Dominion Covenant; her place in it depends on the whims of the man, to whom she is attached as a “helper,” which, in this type of thinking, won’t be the Biblical helper, but rather a housemaid in the modern sense of the word. (Not a mate, but a maid.) But the logic doesn’t stop there. If dominion over God’s creation is what defines the image of God in man (because that is what is given as definition in Genesis 1), then the woman, as having no dominion task and purpose of her own, is by definition a lesser bearer of the image of God; or, she has it in an unequal measure. Let me repeat the logical sequence: it all starts from property and its relation to the Dominion Mandate. If the woman can’t own property, then she is charged with no dominion responsibilities of her own; if she has an unequal share of the dominion covenant, then she has an unequal share of the image of God. She is a lesser being.

If you imagine that no one has such views today, think twice. As a matter of fact, the majority of the patriarchy movement (or whatever debris are left of it today, after the numerous scandals of abuse in the last one decade) shares such views of the lesser measure of the image of God in women. Most patriarchalists agree with John Knox that women are not in the image of God compared to men, because they are not allowed to have dominion over men. (In this, Knox is amazingly un-Biblical, given that the Bible doesn’t allow dominion of human beings one over another, only dominion over God’s creation.) There was a sermon discussed recently from one of those patriarchalist preachers who declared that women are not equally created in the image of God. That his church didn’t excommunicate him on the spot as a heretic is only another evidence that even our “conservative, Bible-believing churches” have become dull and anti-Biblical to the core. Anyway, this for another episode.

But if the woman is permitted to have property, then, by the logic I mentioned above, she is charged with dominion responsibilities as much as the man is. The parables of the talents and the minas are then addressed to men only generically; they apply to all women who have been given property. Women are equally responsible for the stewardship of their own property, and there is no way to declare that women are unequal in dominion. And if they are equal in dominion to men, they are equal in the image of God. Property is the great equalizer (ironic, huh?). If property rights are equal to all, then all human beings – men and women – are equal. And therefore, egalitarianism would be a Biblical doctrine, contrary to some idiotic babblers today who speak against egalitarianism without knowing what the word means and what the Bible says about it.

The answer to the question is this: The Bible contains no provisions against women owning property. To the contrary, women in the Bible own their tents and houses, own land, own businesses, trade real estate on the markets, manage servants, make decisions about supporting ministries without asking their husbands (ever thought about the fact that rich married women followed Jesus and supported Him from their own estates?). Etc., etc. I have talked in a previous episode of Axe to the Root about the excellent wife (or, literally, the army wife) of Proverbs 31: the woman described there is every bit a dominion person as any man you know . . . and more than many men I know. That is, women are every bit equal to men in the task of the Dominion Covenant (contrary to our modern patriarchalists). Women own property, and therefore women are charged with the task of dominion, equal to men, period.

That means, however, that women as property owners have the same sacred rights to their property as men. If a woman owns property, it is hers, and no earthly institution can lawfully take it away from her: such attempt would be a direct attempt on the image of God in her, that image of God that is defined by the task of dominion. And when I say no earthly institution, yes, I mean also the family. A woman’s property is her property, and it is divinely protected against her family, her church, and against the state. Even when she was adopted in another family with her property, her property remained hers, and she and her children had the right to inheritance in that family. This is the reason why the closest relative to Naomi and Ruth refused to redeem their property and adopt them in his family, because he would have to split his inheritance with Ruth in the name of her deceased husband (Ruth 4:5); “it would jeopardize my own inheritance,” he said. Property was divinely sanctioned in the Law, and women could own property, and their ownership of property was just as divinely protected. There was no lawful way to deprive a woman of her property – not even her husband could do it.

That sacredness of property rights was expressed in the Law of God in two ways – as a principle, and as legal and political practice. As a principle, it was given in the Eighth Commandment: “You shall not steal.” The Commandment is clear, however, what is not so clear is the multiple practical ways of stealing, some of which are not always obvious to all of us, because of inherited cultural bias. For example, we all understand that private theft is forbidden, but in our own culture, we seldom think of government theft as a real theft. But the Eighth Commandment forbids that theft also, and the practical and legal practice it has established in the Law of God is that the Law never sets up an executive branch of civil government. The civil government in the Bible is all judiciary, never executive. There are no government departments of roads, health, education, economy, tariffs, immigration, labor relations, etc. There is not a single verse that charges the civil government with taking care of any of these.

I have talked about this in my lectures at the Freedom Conference last year in Tucumcari, New Mexico. You want a true Biblical civil government? Pay attention to the system in the Law of God: the only government institutions there are the courts, and a court is only convened when there is a dispute or a crime to resolve and punish. This government system, where the government has no other functions but a judiciary, is the only system that can prevent the government from using its power to steal private property – simply because there is no one to steal it for. Only when the government is executive, that is, it is a “family” of its own, with its own property and ambitions and economic decisions, private property is not protected.

For many years after the fall of the Roman Empire, that’s what Christendom had as the ideal government: a government that was limited to being a judiciary. The kings and governors had their own property that they ruled as private owners, and their subjects had their property that they ruled as private owners. Property was thus legally protected against government confiscation. There were wars and invasions, provinces changed hands from one ruler to another, but the inhabitants of those provinces kept their properties, and the systems of ownership seldom changed. For the average property owner in France in the 14th and the 15thcentury, for example, it barely mattered whether his province was under the King of England or under the King of France, or under the Duke of Burgundy; he would still own his land and would produce on his land. The only thing that changed was the judges he had to go to in case there was a crime or a dispute. In such a system, a property owner didn’t have to meet any government officials all his life, and didn’t have to worry who was a government official in the first place. Voting was held for local village and town councils, but even there, who or what party was in power didn’t mean much: property was protected, period. As I pointed out in a lecture many years ago, “Europe as a Mirror to America,” even the Parliaments in medieval times were rather a judicial authority, sort of a supreme court, not a legislative or an executive authority.

The Enlightenment changed that. It is during that period that the old pagan concept of the government as an executive force made a comeback. It was specifically expressed in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, where he spoke of his idea of the “separation of powers” between legislative, executive, and judicial. It was not a real separation of powers, not by a long shot, given that he still vested all these powers in the state. But the new thing that most modern commentators miss is that he talked about the government having an executive power. That means, the government developing as a separate person, a self-contained expression of the “general will” of Rousseau, and as a surrogate family (or clan) of the society, devouring all other institutions and making decisions for them. The first signs of such ideas in Christendom came way before the Enlightenment, of course, and were the reason for the Puritan Revolution in England: Charles I’s attempts at monopolizing commerce in the hands of the Crown were a matter serious enough for the Puritans to take arms. But it was the Enlightenment – both left-wing (France) and right-wing (Scotland and England) – that fully restored the old pagan concept of the state as a self-existing executive agent, entitled to the lives, liberty, and property of its subjects . . . er, pardon me, citizens. When the French Revolution started, this issue became very clear from the very beginning: no private property was safe and sacred anymore. I won’t go into details, but on this issue, you have to read an article in the Louisiana Law Review by the New York attorney and historian Maurice Wise, titled “Requisition During the French Revolution.” Ironically, one of the main grievances from before the Revolution, quartering royal troops in private homes, which was only sporadically applied by the royal government and almost always successfully resisted by the local population, was made into a law under the Revolutionary government: no one could resist it. For the purposes of requisition, commissars were appointed by the government who could requisition any private property they wanted without any compensation whatsoever. Universal conscription – the infamous levée en masse – was instituted, something France had never seen in its history before. (Under the monarchy, the final word on whether a young man could be conscripted belonged to his father; if the father refused to let his son become a soldier, no one could conscript him.) The Enlightenment envisioned a government that would be the expression of the “general will” of the nation; when that government really took shape, its first concern was to start stealing the private property, incomes, and productive time of the nation’s individuals and families.

Under such government, no property owner was safe. All of a sudden, a property owner was now in a position to fear the government even if he hadn’t committed any crime – because an executive government always considers itself entitled to private property, whether a crime is committed or not. In fact, not only that, but now the very act of evading surrendering your property to the state was made into a crime. (Yes, that’s the true origin of the IRS and the IRS Code: straight from leftist ideology of the Enlightenment.) Even worse, no woman who was a property owner could be safe. Under a strictly judiciary government, there still may be corrupt judges, but there is no government apparatus that is busy confiscating property; so a woman who is a property owner is generally protected. Under an executive government, even if all the judges are crystal pure and moral and honest, they can’t do anything if the government, under its new laws, decides to take a woman’s property; after all, the judges can only use the existing laws, and the executive state makes its own laws independent of God’s Law. When the state changes from judiciary to executive state, the family is now supplanted with the new greater family, the state. And everyone is a child to the state, and their property belongs to the state.

Women were then placed in a very precarious position: they had no influence on the legislative process, and yet, that very legislative process was now designed to pass new laws to take away their property. To make matters worse, the Enlightenment also restored the patriarchal ideology of paganism. (Yes, contrary to what Phillip Kayser believes, his patriarchalism comes straight from the paganism of the Enlightenment; it has nothing to do with the Bible.) Women, who previously, under Christendom, were considered equal to men and were property owners, business managers, insurance agents, even rulers, were now, under the Enlightenment’s ideology, considered to be lower than men and incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone of property or business. Rushdoony speaks about this resurgence of patriarchalism in the Enlightenment, in his Institutes, Vol. 1, pp. 349-353. The Enlightenment, by postulating the women to be little more than children and imbeciles, resulted in wheat Rushdoony called a “legal revolution,” in which women were deprived from all social rights under the disguise of “protecting” them. In the US, such influence came through William Blackstone’s Commentaries. Rushdoony quotes different sources of the time, and all of them declare that in marriage, the wife, no matter how much property she has had, surrender all that property to her husband. Listen to this quote from Roper’s Law of Husband and Wife:

It is not generally known, that whenever a woman has accepted an offer of marriage, all she has, or expects to have, becomes virtually the property of the man thus accepted as a husband; and no gift or deed executed by her between the period of acceptance and the marriage is held to be valid; for were she permitted to give away or otherwise settle her property, he might be disappointed in the wealth he looked to in making the offer.

Seriously, this was in the law books of the time, all influenced by the Enlightenment. Some simply said, “The wife is only a servant of her husband,” in plain text, and even used Biblical verses to support it. Others deprived the wife of the right to even make a will, or to contest the will of her husband if he didn’t provide any support for her – even if he made his fortune out of the wealth she brought into the marriage. By the middle of the 19th century, women were legally  deprived of almost all social rights they had won under Christendom – all under the pretext that they were being “placed under an umbrella of protection,” of course. And especially of the right to own property. The laws that did that were written by men, voted on by men, and enforced by men. Women were the weaker vessel and were treated like wartime spoils – a source of enrichment rather than partners of equal dignity and value. That’s what power religion always does: it postulates inequality (on the Great Chain of Being), then it postulates the “need for protection” for the “lesser” beings, but on terms set by the “greater” and more powerful beings, and ends up in pure exploitation and injustice against the “lesser” beings. That applied to Ameican slavery. It applies to patriarchy as well.

It is in this context that the first movements for women’s rights started, as Rushdoony points out. The cause was righteous: by depriving women of their rights, they were deprived of their ability to be agents of dominion, according to the creation mandate. The church took the wrong side on that, again, as Rushdoony points out: it took the side of the patriarchalists in power positions, not the side of justice. That was the sole reason the feminist movement eventually got hijacked by the enemies of God: not because women’s rights are inherently bad, but because the church abandoned and even opposed a righteous social cause. (Which is why ideas like Kayser’s view on women’s suffrage will lead to even more victories for the enemies of God.) But things got even worse; from men trying to steal their wives’ property and inheritance through legislation and court action, the ideology of the Enlightenment moved to its final goal: men using the government stealing the property of everyone. And not just property as estate, but also property as labor. Income tax was gradually introduced in all Western nations, and eventually, it was made universal, and also graduated, so that the more productive a person is, the higher percentage they pay. The cycle was complete: from Biblical government which is only judiciary and protective of property, to government that taxes – that is, confiscates – property, to government that allows men to confiscate the property of their wives, to government that claims full ownership over everyone’s property and labor and liberty. This is where Phillip Kayser has lost the logical connection: the civil government we have today has nothing to do with the civil government in the Bible. And therefore we need temporary mechanisms to at least mitigate some of the destruction this modern pagan civil government does.

Modern voting, therefore, developed not as an extension of Biblical voting, but as a phenomenon entirely within the framework of the revived pagan concept of executive government – or, a government that has made itself into a surrogate family for the nation. It was to create at least some checks and balances to such a government – not perfect checks and balances, but then again, we are talking about temporarily mitigating the evils of an already evil system. No taxation without representation. Yes, I know, it is a faulty principle, but it is at least something in the context of a government that can use laws to take away your property. At the beginning, it was only property owners who voted, but then again, only property was taxed. Women were also property owners, and they were on the wrong side of the system, victimized by both the state and by their husbands (through the courts); therefore, women’s vote was necessary to give the women the same representation to protect their own property against both the state and against their own husbands. Eventually, the state moved to tax also income; and that made it necessary to include income-earners – even if they didn’t have any property. At every step of the state moving in to confiscate property and income through taxation, a new constituency of voters had to be instituted to create a counterbalance to the thieving gang of bureaucrats. Not perfect, of course, but something.

Modern voting, therefore, is not the Biblical voting. The Biblical voting was voting to maintain the peace: a judicial system that revolved around a fixed judicial Law. Life, liberty, and property were protected by that Law, so the results of the voting did not affect the rights of anyone. Modern voting is an act of war – ideally, by design, if not in practice – against an ever-encroaching state, trying to consume lives, liberty, and property. In such a war of protection of the home, there is no difference between men and women. So if Kayser wants to find modern voting in the Bible, it is not in the mechanisms for electing judges, but in Judges 9:53, where a woman threw a millstone from the wall and crushed Abimelech’s head. Modern voting is protection of property and liberty in a world of injustice. A specific system of oppression requires specific ways of protection of justice. It is this fact that Phillip Kayser and all the patriarchalists who want to bar women from voting are missing. In modern voting, just as in Biblical defense of the home, where women could and had to participate, it is not only permitted for women to vote, but they should be expected to do so, in defense of their property, their families, and their inheritance. Contrary to Kayser, women’s suffrage today doesn’t  diminish the family. It strengthens it against the executive state. It is Kayser’s own fallacious interpretation that diminishes justice and opens the door for injustice.

Of course, most of Kayser’s thesis is about church voting, and he applies it to civil voting only as an extension. Unfortunately, however, things have changed in church voting as well. It is not the same voting as described in the Bible, and it is not even the same voting as it was several centuries ago. In the church, as well, executive church government has sought to replace family government; and church leaders have changed the very meaning of “church” into an institution that lays claims to people’s property and income while trying to avoid checks and balances that control the use of resources. The church has always relied on financial support from women. This is not just in history outside the Biblical narrative, it is also mentioned as a standard situation in the Bible: wealthy women followed Jesus and His disciples and supported them from their wealth (Luke 8:3). By their decision to support Jesus’s ministry from their wealth, these women did have certain power over how much money the ministry would have, power that Jesus and the apostles didn’t have. (Besides Jesus’s divine power, but that’s a different issue altogether.) There was no institutional executive power to tell these women how much of their wealth or income they were supposed to donate to the ministry in order to consider them legally “members of the church.” There was no executive power in Jesus or His disciples to apply sanctions if the women didn’t pay enough, or a certain percentage. There is no mention in the New Testament of Jesus or the Apostles voting what to do with church funds; and there is no mention of the tithe being a condition for institutional church membership. Women could be church members, and still controlled how much they were giving to the church; and by this controlled, they also controlled what the funds were used for. If the church used the funds for the wrong purposes, the donors didn’t have to give; there was no duty on them to subsidize ecclesiastical waste. If men voted, they voted on matters of doctrine and ministry. The donors decided if they wanted to support it.

Such is not the case today. The churches have become the same executive governments as the state. Their main concern is money, and how the money is going to be spent. In addition to it, membership is now made conditional upon tithe payment. I have been in several Presbyterian churches where membership was conditional upon payment of tithes, and families had to present their tax return forms to assure the church leadership that they had paid their tithes. One church, when I asked them about their support for homeschooling families (after I found out that the elders were funneling tithe money to a local private school, in which all of them had a stake), replied that homeschooling families were eligible for help only after they presented all the proof that they had paid their tithes. The churches – and especially those supposedly “Reformed” and “conservative, Bible-believing” – have turned into the same greedy monsters as are our socialist political masters. With their powers of manipulation, no one’s property is safe, just as it isn’t safe under the executive power of the modern state. That, again, is missed by Phillip Kayser in his thesis.

Again, in the context of churches that have turned into independent executive powers, laying claim to people’s property and income, voting in the churches has changed its very nature and meaning. It is not voting for maintaining a system of law and doctrine anymore. It is a constant war for spoils: how much property and income can be robbed from the subjects, and how much of it can be re-directed for the purposes of the church elite. The churches are not the same as those in the Bible, the government of the churches is not the same, and therefore the voting is not the same, in meaning and in purpose. Therefore, the Biblical voting doesn’t speak to our modern voting. In the same way, voting in the church today is similar to women fighting to protect their homes and their property against invaders or tyrannical rulers. There is no good Biblical reason to stop women from voting in the church. If Kayser wants to return the things to the Biblical pattern, he first needs to argue for a full removal of all financial and economic decisions from church leadership, and leave them to the voluntary work of the donors. And have the elders only vote and decide on matters of doctrine and prayer, as in Acts 6:4. Only then the church would be restored to its Biblical function and meaning, and then Kayser can argue for no vote for women. But as long as property and incomes of church members are at stake, and as long as there is manipulation by the church leadership as to donations and decisions about money, women – who are property owners and produce income – must be allowed to vote, in order to protect their property and income.

This week I will assign not a book but a series of lectures I delivered at the Freedom Conference last year in Tucumcari NM. Specifically about the difference between an executive state and a judiciary state. That difference is very important for you to understand, given that without it, you won’t be able to properly understand modern state and church government vis-à-vis the Biblical view of government. If you don’t understand that modern governments are not even close to the Biblical view of government, you may always end up defending political and ecclesiastical paganism in the name of Christ. And when you understand it, always make all your other assessments of modern government and politics in its context.

In your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries and our work of building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translation and publishing of books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Including politics. Including voting. Including helping the people of Eastern Europe have an understanding of government that is informed by the Bible and therefore build their political and social action on Biblical principles. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter to learn about our work, and donate. God bless y’all.

Welcome to Episode 73 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I want to cover a topic in which, I must admit, I am not very well prepared. I have spent the last couple of weeks reading up on it; that topic has never seemed very appealing to me, until I started reading. It has always seemed to be quite boring; and there were topics way more interesting than it. But I thought I should start getting me up to date on that topic, since it has become quite popular in the general culture, and among Christians. Not that I want to run where the popular opinion goes; but every topic that God raises in the society as an important problem to resolve, needs to be given a covenantal analysis – and, hopefully, a covenantal solution. So I will try to at least give it a start here. Nothing of what I say in this episode should be considered my final opinion; I will continue educating myself on this issue, and I may see some of my analysis go through changes. Either way, a covenantal analysis must be at least started, and hopefully, others will also continue working on it.

The topic is agriculture. And I want to specifically cover the topic of food production. And within that topic, I want to tackle the subtopic of “quantity vs. quality.” I will explain what I mean.

In the last several years, a debate has formed around the quality of the food produced in the Western societies, a debate which did not exist a few decades back – at least not when I was teenager. On one end of that debate is what I call the “traditional,” or the “technological” party. Their view is that food should be produced in greater and greater quantities, and for this reason, all the scientific discoveries and available technological tools must be used, even if that means that, at some point, the quality of the food may suffer. The most visible player in that group is Monsanto, with their relentless drive for more technological discoveries that would increase the production of food, or decrease the destruction of crops. There are other players, too, not as big as Monsanto, but just as determined to discover newer and newer technological ways for increasing the production of food; for example, Monsanto’s competitors BASF in Germany, Syngenta in Switzerland, and Dupont Pioneer. I know, I know, based on a lot of bad publicity of the last decade or so, to quite a few people, the name Monsanto sounds like Satan. However, the stated mission and vision of all these companies is the increase of agricultural productivity by any means possible and any tools available to mankind. And there is much sense in what they are saying, if we sift out the propaganda. I still remember, in Eastern Europe before 1989, the times when food production was lagging behind the needs of a growing population. The Soviet Union, for all its vast expanses of naturally irrigated, arable land, never seemed to be able to feed its own population, so they had to constantly import food. The situation was similar in the other countries of Eastern Europe – we always had to wait in lines for basic food products. And it wasn’t like this was anything unusual; such shortage of food has been the normal state of mankind for centuries. And now that the population of the earth has grown exponentially, the danger seems to be ever present. Just a century ago, only 7% of all agricultural land in the world was used. Today, this percentage has grown to 40. And the population is still rising. The population growth of the planet has slowed a bit, but, still, we are adding a billion every 12-13 years. If we continue down that road, by 2050, we will run out of arable land. True enough, we have much more land that can be improved by irrigation and fertilizing – just look at the Sahara Desert alone – but while such development is possible, it is also expensive in terms of energy and human capital. So if it comes to it, we can certainly develop vast stretches of currently unusable land, but at what cost, and how would that affect the food prices? The problem is much greater than most of us realize: many people think that it is easy to turn a desert into a blooming land. And while it is possible, as examples demonstrate (the western states on the US, Northern Chile, Israel, Egypt, the United Emirates), it also comes at a cost that makes it prohibitive to do at a large scale. So far such examples of reclaiming the land have been profitable only where the food prices have been high or there have been abundant supply of cheap labor. Since labor has been getting more and more expensive worldwide, our only option to turn deserts into agricultural lands is higher prices.

Or, technology. And that’s what Monsanto and its competitors argue for. Our other option is to try to increase the yield from the same acreage. If we can do that, we would be able to produce more food from the same acreage, thus solving the problem with the production of food. How much more can we produce from the same acreage? More about it later.

On the other end of the spectrum is what is called today “organic farming.” Now, until recently, I mistakenly believed that the concept of organic farming had to do with the quality of the food produced: that food from organic farms is better quality than food from conventional farms: healthier, better taste, etc. I personally never saw a difference in the taste, having tried both conventionally produced and organic products. I have also never seen any evidence that the quality of organic food is superior: after all, if all the food produced before the modern era was organic (as supporters of organic farming claim), why is it that mankind has experienced greater longevity after the introduction of the industrial methods of agriculture? Aren’t we supposed to die younger from those inorganically-produced foods? When I started educating myself on the issue, I found out I was not the only one who didn’t have evidence of such superiority of organic foods: the multiple studies done over the last several decades are rather inconclusive. Some do find difference, others don’t. Either there is no difference between organic and conventional food, or our modern methods of testing (and tasting) can’t categorically make out the difference.

When I started reading up on it, however, I discovered that the concept of organic farming had less to do with the quality of food – although, there are some who claim that it is superior –  and more to do with the quality of farming itself. The methods of organic farming are not designed to necessarily produce tastier and healthier food; may be, only may be, the result would be such, but it would all depend not so much on the farming methods but also on the systems of distribution. The word “organic” did not relate to the chemical terms “organic” and “inorganic,” as in manure is organic matter while nitrogen fertilizers are inorganic substances. It had to do rather with the view of the long term relation between the farmer and the land, and the sustainability of the land in its natural state, as over against making it an exploitable resource which is to be exhausted until it can’t produce, and then maintain it in an unnatural state of being supported with chemicals with the purpose of maintaining its productivity. (Like a football player who is constantly kept on steroids and anabolics so that he can perform all the time.) The term “organic” presupposed that the farm is an organism, and as an organism, the farmer is supposed to take care of it as an organism, so that it lives as an organism, naturally and smoothly, so that at the end of his life, he can transfer to his successors or heirs a living system which is in the same or better natural condition than it was when he took possession of it. The land is not supposed to be worked to death as a slave; it is supposed to be maintained and nourished as a partner; and no, I am not speaking here of some sort of animistic fetishism where the land itself is a person and people need to have some occult unity with it. It is rather the attitude one has to his car, house, or business office. We don’t just exploit our cars without any maintenance, and neither do we do maintenance only after the car has broken. We try to do things that are “natural,” “organic” to the car: we change the oil, we check and refill the fluids, we rotate the tires, etc. We have the same attitude to our houses and to our business offices. We try to anticipate and prevent the breakdown, we don’t just patch things up after the breakdown has happened. And that’s the philosophy behind organic farming. It’s not that inorganic chemistry is not allowed; but only that is allowed that preserves the natural state of the soil and the plants, so that the land can keep producing over and over again without any necessity to be patched up with unnatural remedies.

And while the studies about the health and the taste of organic foods are inconclusive, it looks like other tests are quite conclusive: namely, that organic farming does indeed achieve the results it has set out to achieve: organic farms consistently demonstrate improved soils, greater biodiversity, lesser need for added chemicals (assuming that chemicals are by default unhealthy, of which I am not convinced), and, as a result of all this, gradually increasing productivity. The productivity of organic farms, however, still trails behind that of conventional agriculture: the best confirmed results are about 80% of the productivity of comparable conventional farms. On another indicator – prices – organic food is still prohibitively expensive for the majority of the world’s population. This has been the reason for two facts about organic food production: first, it is still quite small compared to the total food production ($80 billion out of a total of 2 trillion a year, or less than 5%), and, second, its markets are almost entirely limited to North America and Europe, that is, to populations that can afford the high prices. And, one more misconception that needs to be corrected, namely, that for centuries, mankind has been practicing organic farming, and only recently started practicing industrial farming. That’s not true. For centuries, mankind has been doing agriculture without any regard for the land and its sustainability. A group of people would come to a clearing in the woods, would expand it by cutting the trees, plow the land and sow their seeds, the land would then be exploited for several years until it became completely barren, and then the people would move to another location. That has been the history of the world for centuries. Very few locations had conditions favorable enough to do agriculture that was not destructive to the land. (And these locations developed might civilizations and became a magnet for conquest.) Individual methods of organic farming have developed throughout history, and have been used, but never at a large scale, and never conclusively enough to maintain sustainability. Organic farming is not the ancient or conventional farming. It is a new thing. It is the modern way.

So, we have conventional farming, concerned with the fact that a growing population needs to have growing production of food, and all the help modern science and technology can offer. And we have organic farming concerned with food production as a holistic system which includes the land as its main resource, trying to assure the sustainability of the land, that is, its improved condition after the food is produced. And the two are in some sort of a debate, which is better and which needs to be supported. And I was asked about my opinion on that debate. Which side am I on? Am I on the side of conventional farming and its drive for production of more and more food, using every scientific and technological tool we have at our disposal? Or am I on the side of organic farming and its care for the land not just as a resource to be depleted but as a partner to be respected and taken care of?

Where should my answer start? From the Dominion Covenant, of course.

In the command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and take dominion over it, there was an implicit command: make the earth itself fruitful. While man was created to be a steward over creation, under God, he was also made to be dependent on that creation. He could, of course, abandon his task of taking dominion over the earth, but that would come at a cost: he would starve. His body was created in such a way as to depend on the constant supply of new energy, in order to keep him going. A failure to supply that energy to his body would disqualify him from the task of taking dominion; forgive me for using such technical language for “die,” but from the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, that’s how it looks like. It gets even worse than that, given that God created innumerable ways in which energy can be transferred and transformed and utilized, but he didn’t make too many of them compatible with the functions of the human body. Man cannot absorb direct energy and use it for his bodily functions – if he could, we wouldn’t have any problem with radiation, it would be food for us. But bare naked energy doesn’t qualify as food for us, and in fact, outside a miniature band on the frequency spectrum, all direct energy is harmful to the human body. We can’t even take that energy stored in chemical substances: almost all chemical substances that have stored energy in them are toxic to humans – think strong acids and bases and active radicals. (This has nothing to do with political revolutionaries.) We can only use that energy when it is stored in special organic molecules, so complex that their production takes a long process, still barely understood by biochemists. We can’t even consume all kinds of organic molecules: the majority of common organic substances are either non-nutritional or even toxic to humans. Only certain organic molecules are capable of delivering energy to the human body. After the flood, God expanded the supply: certain organic substances are not edible for humans, but they are edible for some animals; and God made those animals edible for humans. But still, the same principle remained: the road from simple bare energy to energy fit to nourish the human body is very long and complex.

In simple words, God created the human body to have a need to replenish its energy, but He didn’t make it easy for man to absorb that energy. Even for one human body, the work needed to transform and supply that energy amounts to trillions of molecular transformations every day, from simple sunlight and the low-energy molecules of water and carbon dioxide to the incredibly complex molecules of our food. Not to mention the incredibly complex molecules of the apparatus in our body that takes the energy from the food and transports it to the cells. (Try to figure and understand the molecule of adenosine tri-phosphate, the substance that transports energy within our bodies.) That for one human body.

But the Dominion Covenant was not about one such body, nor about two such bodies. It was about becoming fruitful, and multiplying (reproducing) and filling the earth. That meant, billions of human bodies. Perhaps tens or hundreds of billions, who knows. And for all these human bodies, there has to be a sufficient supply of energy. That is, a sufficient supply of energy in the form of a very small set of very complex organic molecules, only capable of delivering energy to humans. And now you probably understand the vastness of the problem. That means that this gigantic process of building up complex organic molecules from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water has to be replicated trillions and quadrillions of times every single day. No, I am not being dramatic; it’s just all of us today in the 21st century West take it for granted that food somehow appears on our table. You need food? Just go to the nearest store. There’s plenty of food there, waiting for you to buy it. As if that was not enough, many different brands of the same types of food, competing for your attention. But stop and think: this abundance is rather an exception in history, and it has been around for only a few decades, and that only limited to a specific part of the world, the West. And it only appeared because the West had applied in practice the worldview that it inherited from Christendom; but today, that same West is abandoning the Christian faith that was the foundation of that worldview. It is possible, indeed, that the effects of that worldview are here to stay, as part of the growing Kingdom of God in history – such is my personal conviction. But could it be that we are living in a modern version of Joseph’s seven plentiful years, and the world – and specifically the West – is being stored up for judgment? And if this is the case, Christians need to start thinking of ways to use this abundance to store food. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to start building granaries; physical storage of food can be quite insecure. With our modern knowledge, a possible way of “storing” food may be to invest in more research to increase the productivity of the land, so that when the years of famine come, we can offer ways to keep the productivity of the land high, compared to everyone else around.

Either way, no matter what happens in the near or distant future, this is about the most important question of the Dominion Covenant: given that food is the most basic necessity of mankind, and given that mankind is commanded to be fruitful and multiply, and given that the amount of land available is limited, we are brought to the most basic reality – and the most basic aspect of the Dominion Mandate – namely, that we are supposed to throw a lot of effort into increasing the productivity of our agriculture. We have no other choice, if we are to fulfill that Dominion Mandate; no matter how much effort we throw in anything else – transportation, machines, cell phones and TV screens, clothing, tools – in the final account, our land must produce more and more nutrition per square meter, or we won’t be able to fulfill the purpose we were created for. That’s non-negotiable.

Of course, we can’t afford to become victims of the delusion that the productivity of the land can be increased indefinitely. There is a limit to it. That limit is the amount of sunlight energy that hits the surface of the earth. In the episode on pollution, we saw that when an object is at its lowest energy state, it can’t give away anymore energy – like a ball at the bottom of the hill that has no more down slope to roll. It takes energy to take it from its lowest energy state and move it to a position where it can give away energy. The two raw materials for building organic molecules, water and carbon dioxide, are at their lowest energy level. The only source of energy in the process of producing food is sunlight, nothing else. Of course, you can say that nutrients in the soil are a factor, too, but then again, they come from organic matter, and it is previously produced from sunlight. The inorganic fertilizers do not provide net energy to the process – they are only catalysts, that is, they only provide energy short-cuts for the energy transformations, but no new energy. Thus, our theoretical limit is how much energy from sunlight hits the surface of the earth.

That theoretical limit, surprisingly, is quite high. On a clear sunny day, the energy density of sunlight per square meter of perpendicular surface is 1 kW per square meter; that is, translated into the system unit of energy, joule, every second, a square meter absorbs 1,000 joules of energy. (If you want it in units closer to home, every hour, one square meter absorbs 1 kWh of energy.) The need of the human body for energy is not that high: a minimum 2,500 calories for an average man and 2,000 calories for an average woman per day. That’s not much: it is about 10,000 joules per man, or less than 3 Wh (equal to the average electricity consumption of your household for two hours). To make the comparison with sunlight, if the human body was perfectly capable of absorbing pure energy from sunlight, one square meter of land could have provided all the daily energy for one man within 10 seconds. Imagine if we could do that: 10 seconds of direct sunlight on your solar panels, and you are full. One or two minutes, and your whole family is fed. But we can’t do that. Only plants can absorb sunlight and transform its energy. So we need to find ways for plants to reach as near as possible to that theoretical limit of absorbing all the sunlight and transforming it all into energy. Of course, of course, I know this is only a theoretical limit. Under the Second Law of Thermodynamics, transformation of energy from one form into another never happens without some dissipation of energy into heat; the little energy transformers within those green leaves are not an exception, and what we get in calories from any food-producing plant is not even one-millionth of the sunlight hitting it over the course of one year. The most productive plant in terms of calories – sugar cane – only produces 3,500 calories a year from a square meter; which means that if a man was to survive on sugar cane calories alone, he’d need 260 square meters of sugar cane. And the numbers are much worse for other crops: for example, it will take 1,500 square meters, or one-third of an acre, to keep a man fed. This doesn’t sound awfully much, but then you need to multiply it by 7 billion people, and the numbers become overwhelming.

No matter how you look at it, increasing the productivity of our agriculture is a non-negotiable mandate; we just can’t stay at the same level, and we can’t return to earlier levels of productivity. And no matter how nostalgic we may be about the past and its idyllic times of free peasants producing their own food within local communities where everyone personally knows the farmers who produced their food, such vision is impossible to sustain practically, and, also, it is oriented towards the past, which means, in covenantal terms, that it is barren and unfruitful. Those days are gone. They are gone just like the days when you could personally know the person who made your shoes, or the person who bore the barrel of your musket, or the days when your wife made all the clothes for your family out of cloth you bought from your local weaver. The necessity of increased productivity will mean that every producer on the market will become more and more specialized in his own trade, and therefore will become more detached from the trades of other producers. That’s the inevitable consequence from the increasing division of labor; and division of labor is the main factor for the increased productivity of anything, including agriculture.

The initial natural and logical consequence from the Dominion Mandate, therefore, would be that mankind would have to think first of its own survival, and of increasing the productivity of the land and of agriculture, no matter what other long-term considerations may appear. After all, even if we wanted to preserve the land and make it richer instead of poorer, or rely on sustainable nutrition of the land, or aim at preserving biodiversity etc., we may find ourselves spending too much scarce energy into something that would leave us starving. From the very beginning, the clock of Adam’s stomach was ticking against him, and Adam had no time to think of preserving the land as a natural organism. (As a matter of fact,  the “natural” state of the land was desert.) He had to draw everything he could, out of that barren land, and worry first about his own survival and about the survival of his family; and only later, when that survival is secured, work to improve the land as a capital resource. Adam didn’t have the luxury to go organic. While judicially, all the resources on the planet belonged to him, in practice, he was poorer than the poorest person today, because none of these resources were available for immediate use. All he could hope to get from one day’s work was one day’s survival. When a person is poor and can’t afford for more than survival, he doesn’t care what kind of food he eats – as long as there is food on the table. (Yes, that’s why McDonalds is good for certain people in certain circumstances, whether you like it or not.) And he certainly doesn’t care what side effects his agriculture produces – as long as it produces the main effect, namely, enough food for survival. And, also, keep in mind this: throughout history, the vast majority of human beings were dirt poor, and the main effort in the society was to produce food to put on the table. To give you a glimpse of what it was, today, most of us do not know too many people who work in agriculture; at the most, if you are a city dweller, barely more than 2 or 3 in 100 of your friends in involved in agriculture for a living. And yet, with so few people in agriculture, food is abundant. But if you lived 200 years ago or earlier, about 90% of your friends would be involved in agriculture. Why? Because, given the average productivity at the time, an agricultural producer would barely be capable of producing enough food to take care of his own household and workers, let alone have spare food to sell to the market. Having such a vast majority of the population on subsistence farming meant that the price of food was enormous, compared to the average income. As Deirdre McCloskey showed in Bourgeois Dignity, in year 1800, the average family in the world, no matter where they lived, whether Scotland or Bangladesh, survived on an average of $3 a day in today’s value. Enough for a pound of potatoes, a loaf of bread, and very little extra left for clothes, housing, or anything else.

For people in such poverty, Monsanto would be a savior. If you have lived your whole life trying to eke some miserable existence from the ground, a company that offers you the opportunity to produce 3-5 times more from the same ground, and that at affordable prices, is a company that is giving hope and life to your family. And it doesn’t have to be Monsanto. Any of the technological advances of the Western civilization would do: fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, growth control hormones, and of course, genetically modified crops. Why would a person care if, for them, the difference is the difference between life and death, hope and despair, prosperity and starvation? Would they worry first about the quality of the food or about the availability of food? And, given their level of poverty, would they be eager to adopt methods that make their food more expensive – that is, in economic terms, require more effort – or would they go for methods that make their food less expensive, thus freeing labor and resources for other undertakings that would help make their communities more prosperous?

This is what the agricultural revolution of the 18th century did to the West. It was more destructive to the land than before; although, if you take it per unit of produced food, it was about as destructive as before. But if anything, it increased the productivity of the land to the point where, first, starvation was wiped out from the list of imminent threats to mankind, and second, only a small portion of the population needed to work in agriculture now, freeing minds and hands to devise, develop, and operate new technological marvels that would increase the total productivity to levels unheard of before. In the process, the pace of depleting the soils accelerated in many places. (In fact, one of the worst was the American South. No group of landowners exploited its land as brutally and improvidently as the plantation owners in the American South. I guess, once you accept cruel exploitation of human beings as the norm, there is no reason to treat the rest of God’s creation any better.) But that wasn’t a concern for a while, for there were two factors at play now: more land was being opened to cultivation, and more people were being exposed to the new, technological way of producing food. And also, technology brought in chemicals. Whatever the land lost in natural richness, it gained in industrial chemicals. And then, more and more, anytime some ingredient is missing, the producers kept adding more and more chemicals to patch the land up.

How long can this continue? We don’t know, but we know it can’t continue forever. It is like a cheap dormitory which never gets any maintenance, only ad hoc repairs when something breaks down. It may have solved the accommodation problem for many poor or homeless people, but it won’t do it for much longer. Eventually the building will collapse on the tenants. Or, in a better scenario, the cost of repairs will outweigh the cost for tearing it down and building a new dormitory. Except that, in the case of agricultural land, one can’t tear it down and build it anew. The process of restoring it to its naturally productive state takes much longer. Either way, business can’t continue as usual, even if that business may have been profitable in the past and has solved many problems. Something needs to be done. We need to start thinking about planned maintenance that prevents collapse. Some day, patching the land up with chemicals will cost us more than keeping it in a naturally productive state. And we better be prepared for that day.

This is where organic farming comes to play. I believe it is planting the seeds for that future state of agriculture where the land will get its maintenance rather that being patched up chemically, so that the land is equally productive as under conventional farming, and the prices are just as affordable. While it is true that technology has given us enormous advantage in knowing the inner workings of plant growth and nutrition, we also need to be aware of the fact that we will never be able to know all of God’s workings perfectly, and will never be able to know all the different factors working together for the production of our food and for the preservation of the productivity of the land. Just like the scientists will never be able to create life out of inorganic matter, I believe scientists will never be able to create truly nutritional soil out of inorganic chemicals. There will always be more to the picture than we are capable of discerning.

Of course, I also believe that modern “organic farming” is still in its baby steps, and it can barely provide any answers to the issues I raised here. Some of the practices promoted and associated with it are outright bizarre – and I don’t want to go into details here, it is not my purpose in this episode. It is still too small, and it lacks history and traditions, and it still lacks the scientific database that its competitors have. Its deficiencies are a multitude, but the ideology behind it is sound – it is straight in accordance with the Dominion Covenant. And given enough time, it will develop what it is lacking; the nature of God’s creation and the markets will force it. In the final account, if mankind is to fulfill the Dominion Mandate given to it in the Garden, we will have to come to a point where all agriculture is at its maximum productivity, not only short-term, but also long-term, so that we don’t use the fertility of the land as a credit card.

But until we get to that point, we will have to go with the conventional ways of producing food, to assure that we are not all dead of starvation before we get to that better way of doing agriculture.

To summarize, then: Within the context of the Dominion Covenant, there is no contradiction between conventional farming and organic farming. The two focus on the solution of different problems: conventional farming focuses on the scarcity of food, while organic farming focuses on the sustainability of production. Both problems are important and need solutions. But they are spread in time, and have different importance at different times in history. For a long time, the availability of food was the main problem. We are getting to a point where this problem is almost resolved around the world. (Perhaps, and hopefully. Again, this may be a temporary situation.) Its resolution, however, came with an increased use – and often abuse – of the land. Conventional farming accumulated the capital – in the form of increased productivity – for a more responsible stewardship. The next step is using that capital for such responsible stewardship. It won’t happen overnight, and for a long time – perhaps even till the end of time – we will have a combination of the two methods, combining both care for mankind and care for God’s creation. And there is no need to oppose one to the other.

The book I will assign this week is Mark Overton’s Agricultural Revolution in England. The beauty of that book is that it is not simply limited to the technological changes in the English economy, it also looks at the institutional changes that brought about the agricultural revolution. While the author has certain evolutionary presuppositions that are evident throughout the book, it is a good summary of how important that revolution was. A Christian covenantal reader will be able to make his own conclusions about the Dominion Mandate in history from the facts in the book.

In your prayers and in your giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Easter Europe through translation and publishing of books that apply the Gospel to every area of life. Many years ago, when we were starting our mission, an American pastor asked me: “Why are there, among the books you want to translate, so many books on economics?” My answer was: “Because, if a nation has experienced the economic desolation of paganism and is looking for answers in that area, the best stepping stone for presenting the Gospel is to point to the economic productivity of a culture organized on the principles of the Gospel.” So far it has worked, and we are continuing translating and publishing. Keep us working. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. And God bless you all.

Welcome to Episode 72 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will see how giving wrong solutions to problems can get us nowhere, and even worse, will get us deeper into the same problem we are trying to resolve. As Christian Reconstructionists, we are supposed to be problem-solvers – after all, we are the ones who believe that every problem comes from the people’s deviation from the Word of God, and therefore we are the ones who believe that the Bible has a solution to every single problem we can identify in our society today. And that solution is not simply the vague out-worldly solution of the final coming of Christ (although, all problems will eventually have their solutions there), but a specific concrete solution that can be worked out and should be worked and eventually will be worked out in history, before the final coming. And that it can, should, and will be worked out by the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. History is the battleground of the Gospel, and it is the victory ground of the Gospel, and the victory of the Gospel in history will be manifested in the fact that all problems will find their solutions, in history, in the Gospel. Or, to put this statement in Biblical terms, all of Christ’s enemies will be made His footstool, before He returns.

Problem-solvers we should be, that one should be obvious, but before we can be problem solvers, we need to learn to understand the problems, and to understand what causes them. In his book, Revolt Against Maturity, in the chapter on “Regeneration,” R.J. Rushdoony points to several fundamental facts about problems and problem-solving, and one of the facts is that different worldview systems will analyze problems in different ways and will see different roots for the problems and thus, will have different solutions attempted solutions for them. Humanism will mainly see the root of all problems as external to man (because humanism can’t acknowledge that there is systemic and inherent problem in man, and remain consistent), while Christianity will see the root of all problems as internal to man. Their proposed solutions, therefore, will differ from each other. And of course, only those solutions will really work that are based on the truth. An analysis of a problem that is not based on the truth of the Word of God, will give solutions that won’t work. Therefore, when we as Christians speak of solving problems, we need to first make sure that we are analyzing those problem based on the revelation of the Word of God and its application to history, not based on humanistic presuppositions and ethical and intellectual standards.

Unfortunately, in this, we as Christians have pretty bad history. Over and over again, in history, Christians have been swayed by this or that humanistic doctrine or religion only because they sounded so impressively right to our unredeemed senses. From the early ages of the Church, church fathers would utilize Aristotelianism because some enemy of the faith used Platonism, and then switch to that same Platonism because some other enemy of the faith used Aristotelianism; without thinking that both Platonism and Aristotelianism belonged to Athens, not to Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens. At other times, theologians would resort to rationalism to oppose some irrationalist and experientialist movements with in the church, and then the same theologians would resort to the same experientialism and irrationalism when their own teachings meet a rational challenge; without thinking that both rationalism and experientialism come from the presupposition of the autonomous mind of man, and therefore are both anti-Biblical. In recent years, because some enemies of the faith have resorted to feminism, the solution of many churchmen has been to resort to patriarchy; without thinking that both patriarchy and feminism are power religions, not covenantal principles, and therefore both are doctrines of hell. (More about patriarchy later.) We as Christians have often been gullible to adopt anti-Biblical analysis of problems, and as a result, we have often been misled by our our own gullibility to come to anti-Biblical solutions to our problems, which often lead to defeat.

The problem I will be talking about in this episode is sodomy. It has grown to be perceived as one of the main problems of the American culture today by conservative Christians. Just about 20 years ago it was not considered such a gigantic problem; perhaps one of the important problems facing our society, but certainly not a problem of an utmost importance. Today, it takes more preaching time and attention than the issue of abortion. Now, to make it clear from the beginning, I don’t believe that sodomy is such a gigantic problem in our culture; even though its acceptance as “normal” has grown among non-sodomites, this has not led to an increase in the number of those who practice sodomy. The so-called “gay bars” have always existed in the US, and a number of them are “historic,” dating back to 1933, or some even before the Prohibition; there isn’t much of a difference. In fact, if there is any dynamics, it seems like the sodomite community is losing, both in terms of numbers and in terms of economic power. For the last one decade, a number of sodomite publications – including electronic publications – went bankrupt; the last major one being the Frontiers magazine in Los Angeles. Some historic sodomite bars shut down over the same period of time; Houston’s oldest “gay” bar closed for good in November 2009. All the attempts by the sodomite community to salvage it failed; there just weren’t enough people capable and willing to donate. All that is left of it is a few artifacts in a small local museum of sodomite history. Similar decline can be observed across the country: while the media and political presence of a few sodomites appears intimidating, the reality behind them is that the sodomite community is declining. Those of our listeners who remember the Axe to the Root episode on “The Church’s Forgotten History of Sodomite Marriage,” will make the connection to what happened in the mid-15thcentury: sodomy as a lifestyle simply disappeared from Europe, without any significant attempts at eradicating it. By its very nature, it can never last longer than a generation or two.

Of course, declining or not, sodomy is a revolting sin, as Romans chapter 1 shows, and it is an indicator of a very perverse heart. On this one, there should be no argument among Reformed Christians. Where the argument lies, however, is what causes people to fall into that specific type of sin; what triggers it. It is clear that sodomy is not just a “natural” sin, like, for example, fornication or adultery. (I use “natural” in a conditional sense.) Even in their fallen state, all things being equal, boys naturally lust after women, not after men; such lust is spontaneous, often unconscious. God doesn’t make mistakes, He doesn’t put female hormones in male bodies. It takes some special trigger for the heart and the mind of a man to be so twisted as to lust sexually after other men. We all have a sinful nature; we are born with it. It makes us vulnerable to all kinds of sins. But the specific sins we commit are imparted into us by our cultural upbringing; and when it comes to something so unnatural, as sodomy, there have to be some strong cultural triggers to make the mind of a man switch from the “natural” lust after women to the unnatural lust after other men. The question now is, what are the triggers in the culture around us that make young hearts and minds become so perverted as to abandon the natural use of their bodies?

In the last several decades, a movement has appeared within the conservative Reformed and Evangelical segment of the population in the United States, which declares that the reason for the rise of sodomy – if there is such a rise in the first place, I would add – is the rise of what they call “egalitarianism.” The dictionary definition of egalitarianism, of course, is a social and political philosophy asserting the judicial equality of all men. (Women included.) I personally can’t see why egalitarianism would be a bad thing. The meaning this group uses for “egalitarianism” is a bit different, however, and is very particular to them – no one else uses it in the same way. “Egalitarianism” for them is an anthropological or religious doctrine which asserts the ontological identity (or sameness) of men and women. That is, men and women are basically the same, not different in any respect; and the acceptance of this doctrine of sameness has led to the acceptance of sodomy. This is the claim of that movement.

Now, I have never heard nor seen anyone espouse such doctrine. Not even the most radical feminists. In fact, the most radical feminists teach exactly the opposite: that there is a radical difference between men and women. They use it, of course, to postulate the necessity for granting judicial and institutional power of women over men; but this is not sameness nor egalitarianism in any conceivable sense of these words. Now, I have seen feminists espouse egalitarianism in the regular, dictionary sense: as social, judicial, and political equality. Or egalitarianism in the sense of equal job opportunities – which I think is fair enough, if women can do it. But egalitarianism as no distinction between the sexes, that I have never seen preached or proclaimed. Perhaps some isolated, mentally ill activist somewhere; but never at a large scale. And even such isolated, mentally ill activists have appeared only in the last decade or so. I can’t see how they can be blamed for sodomy, which has been present in the US in significant numbers since the beginning of the 20thcentury, at least.

However, for the purposes of this discussion I will assume that there is indeed such form of so-called “egalitarianism” floating around. The argument of that movement is that this “egalitarianism” relativizes all human relationships and makes them equal to one another – it doesn’t matter whether the relationship is between a man and a woman or between a man and a man. And thus, sex between a man and a man is lifted up to the level of sex between a man and a woman. And this is the social and moral cause for sodomy.

Based on their assessments for the causes of sodomy, this movement has a solution. That solution a return to what they call “Biblical patriarchy”; which is supposedly the Biblical doctrine for the family. (It is not, and we will see why, in a few minutes. “Egalitarianism,” as they understand it, realitivizes all social relationships; to counter it, the so-called “Biblical patriarchy” seeks to absolutize all social relationships, starting in the family. Men and women must have strictly distinct roles in the society, and these roles must be inculcated throughout the society and maintained by tradition, government legislation, and social practices. Men are supposed to be the rulers of their families, and the rulers of the society as well; women are supposed to remain passive and submissive at all times, and never assume leading roles in any field. Even where a woman is extraordinarily gifted – better than most men – to work, produce, and innovate in a certain field, she is expected to curb her aspirations and enthusiasm, as well as her exercise of her giftedness, and take the back seat to men who otherwise may be vastly inferior to her; after all, we don’t want a woman teaching or ruling over men. In fact, as per some patriarchalist teachers, it is better for women to not work outside the home at all. “A woman who works outside the home is a whore”: no, I didn’t make this sentence up; it was actually said in a sermon by one of those patriarchalist teachers. (I was present when he said it.) It is even better if girls are simply not allowed to go to college or grow in any professional way; their place is in the home, in the kitchen, learning to take care of their future husbands and children. Authority – as patriarchalists understand it – in the family is given to the husband, and he delegates it to his wife; she has no independent authority under God. (I have shown in a previous podcast that such view reduces wives to mere concubines. The Biblical wife has her own authority under God, she is not delegated anything by her husband.) In order to combat sodomy, therefore, we need to elevate the social status of men above that of women. And, in 100% of the cases, patriarchalists seek to achieve that by lowering the social status of women. Only when women are reduced to the level of children, of wards of men, then sodomy will be successfully defeated.

I must interject here that many good and honest Christians have sincerely fallen for this doctrine. But that doesn’t make the doctrine any more Christian or Biblical; “Biblical patriarchy” is just the same oxymoron as is “Biblical Hinduism” or “Biblical socialism.” Many of these good and honest Christians are trying to present it, and to make it work as a doctrine which is focused on servanthood. Reality is, however, that servanthood doesn’t need institutional power and submission to work, and patriarchy, even in its supposedly “Biblical: version, is a power religion from beginning to end. It is entirely obsessed with structures of power and submission and with who submits to whom. To start with, even the very name “patriarchy,” that is, “father’s rule,” is a misnomer. The concept that children are under the institutional power of their parents is common to all Christian persuasions, so there is really no need for any special doctrine to emphasize this. The real focus, and the real starting point of patriarchalism is not so much the authority of the father over the children, but the institutional power of the husband over the wife, and the submission of the wife to her husband; and of all women to all men; that’s where the real distinctive of patriarchy lies.

The last several weeks, I made several posts on social media covering Jesus’s words in Matt. 20-25-28; Mark 10:42-45; Luke 22:25-27; where Jesus explains the nature of authority among Christians. Among the Gentiles, it is those who are in power that claim to be “benefactors” and have authority over their people; but among you, it will be the other way around: if you want to have authority, you need to serve. Based on those and other verses, I suggested that among Christians, true authority is defined by service, not by one’s gender or ordination papers. I immediately got lots of flak from patriarchalists; their main complaint was, “Are you saying that our wives should rule over us, and we should submit to them?”

This instinctive reaction reveals two characteristics of patriarchy. First, and very ironic, it reveals that in the families of all those patriarchalists, it is the wives who are turned into servants, whereas the men, for all their babbling about “servanthood,” have preserved for themselves the role of “rulers.” Seriously, why would they even ask that question if they were real servants to their families, right? If authority is defined by service, then a man who is a true servant won’t be worried about whether he should submit to his wife; his question rather would be, “What do I need to do to be a better servant, then?” The fact that all patriarchalists – including the few among them who were sincere – weer rather concerned with whether their wives would rule over them, is clear evidence to the fact that patriarchy is nothing more than a power religion. And therefore, whether we attach to it the label “Biblical” or not is of no consequence. It is always un-Biblical. Second, and very telling of the spiritual state of all patriarchalists, in my analysis of the relation between authority and service, I never talked about rule, that is, institutional power. There is a clear difference between power and authority, and I have talked about it in other places; in this, I only follow R.J. Rushdoony who has, in many places, made the distinction between power and authority. Power is the ability of a person to force others to do his bidding – whether through physical force or through manipulation or through institutional mechanisms or other means. Authority is a spiritual reality, and it has nothing to do with power, whether institutional or physical or manipulation. A church can have duly ordained elders, and yet, the real authority in the church – the spiritual influence that shapes the minds and the hearts of the people in that church – can be seated in a man who has no formal ordination or power; as is the case in many churches today, especially Presbyterian churches, where ordaining faceless bureaucrats of no real ministry and no real authority has become the norm. A man can be very forceful and active in his attempts at ruling over his wife and children, and yet, the real spiritual authority in the family, the person through whom God speaks and acts in the family, may be his wife; or at times, even one of the children. This difference between power and authority should be New Covenant 101 to anyone who has read his Bible; the whole New Testament is a story of the conflict between power (Pharisees, Jews, the Roman Empire) and authority (Jesus, the apostles, the early church). In a much more extended and nuanced form the same conflict is threaded through all of the Old Testament as well. And even in church history, for us as Reformed, that same conflict has been at the bottom of the struggles of all the Reformers. I emphasized that definition of authority many times in my discussions, and yet, persistently, patriarchalists insisted that I was trying to make their wives rule over them. The fact that they would always imagine a power-submission relationships where the discussion is clearly about authority as a spiritual reality is another clear indication that no matter what pious epithet we attach to patriarchy (“Biblical,” “Christian,” etc.), it remains a power religion from beginning to end, and therefore is in its very essence always pagan. Yes, even if a number of good and sincere Christians have adopted it as their ideology and practice. And as a pagan ideology, it will always lead to disastrous results. These results may be postponed a bit if patriarchy is mixed with some Biblical principles; but eventually, the results will appear.

Back to the main issue of this episode: in the view of the patriarchalists, what leads to sodomy in the society is “egalitarianism.” (Or what they believe is “egalitarianism,” not the regular dictionary meaning of the word.) In the specific context of our times, a flavor of conspiracy theory is thrown in the mix: that “egalitarianism” was the product of the conspiratorial activities of the Frankfurt School and its so-called “cultural Marxism.” I have talked in a previous episode about that boogieman of “cultural Marxism,” and I have shown why “cultural Marxism” is an oxymoron and a convenient escape for many churchmen from the necessity of doing a serious covenantal analysis of the failure of the church. Conspiracy theory is always more attractive than doing boring Biblical analysis. And the solution to sodomy is patriarchy: elevate men’s social status, make women submit to men, support this power/submission structure through legislation, propaganda (sermons), and social practices; and you will have a defense against sodomy. Simple, heh?

There is a serious problem with this analysis, however. And it is this:

First, there is no Biblical confirmation for it; and second, there is no historical confirmation for it. There has never been a single example of sodomy originating in an egalitarian society. And in fact, if anything – hold onto your chairs now – we have abundant historical examples that same patriarchy which they present as the solution, is in fact the mother of sodomy. Yes, rampant sodomy in the society always follows patriarchy, when patriarchy is the predominant social model; that is, patriarchy always begets sodomy, almost without exceptions. We also have logical reasons to go together with the historical data, namely, to conclude that patriarchy inevitably begets sodomy. And we also have Biblical and historical reasons to believe that the only solution to sodomy is exactly egalitarianism, namely, the doctrine that establishes the judicial, social, and political equality between the sexes. That is, reality is exactly the opposite to what the patriarchalist movement believes: the cause for sodomy is patriarchy, and the solution ot the problem of sodomy is rejecting patriarchy and a return to egalitarianism, which is the Biblical social doctrine, revealed in the Law of God.

So let’s get to the details.

The first and most obvious evidence that patriarchy is related to sodomy is the Biblical record. Romans 1:27 is the only text in the Bible which speaks of the internal motivation for sodomy, it certainly doesn’t speak of any equality between men and women. To the contrary, it says the following: “men abandoned the natural use of the female.” The word for abandonis literally send away. The same word is used multiple times for forgivingsins, in the sense of ignoringsins. It certainly doesn’t indicate that the pagans of Paul’s time elevated women to the position of equal to men; exactly the opposite, the verb there shows that men ignored the women, sent away their natural use, and that led to the spread of sodomy in the Classical world.

Such attitude to women was common to Greece and Rome. Women in Greece and Rome were indeed abandoned by the men in their societies. Women couldn’t inherit property, and women had virtually no rights under their fathers or husbands. As Fustel de Coulanges shows in his study, The Ancient City, in most of the classical cultures, women’s social status was no higher than that of today’s Saudi Arabia. In the so-called “enlightened” Athens, married women couldn’t leave the home without a male companion from the family; they were expected to remain at home all the time. Athens was a strictly patriarchal society, and Solon’s judicial reforms made sure that the patriarchal character of the Athenian society was encoded into the laws as well. And yet, judging from Plato’s Dialogues, sodomy and pederasty were considered the norm. Thebes, another Greek city and capital of Boeotia, was an even more radical example. The ancient myths and the later plays about Thebes by Aeschylus and Sophocles show a society that is strictly stratified, with a strongly subjugated position for women. And Thebes was too sodomite even for the other Greek city-states. You probably remember from a previous episode where I talked about the Theban Sacred Band of sodomite soldiers. And, note that, the mythological history of Thebes starts with a sodomite rape of a young boy by a Theban king. In Rome, sodomy was taken for granted and was not even registered as a deviation; the father of the house (the patriarch) had the right to sexually penetrate anything and anyone in his house – including male or female slaves – without incurring any judicial guilt. That right followed from his judicial position as a patriarch. Rolling back to the early days of Israel, all the surrounding nations that practiced sodomy were also marked by strong social stratification and patriarchy. Not only were those societies tolerant of sodomy, but some even practiced it as a matter of religious ceremony. Over and over again, the extant law codes of those ancient nations show two persistent traits: (1) their societies granted no independent social status to women, and (2) they tolerated sodomy, and only tried to regulate it in some extreme cases (like rape of underage sons by their fathers). And not only their laws, but their extant art also shows that sodomy was prevalent and accepted.

There is a strange exception among those pagan nations in the antiquity: Egypt. Egypt was not a patriarchal society. In fact, it was noted even in the antiquity, by Greek authors, that Egyptian women enjoyed a much higher social status than Greek women. A number of modern studies on the status of women in Egypt also conclude that Egypt was unique among the cultures in the ancient Middle East. Women not only didn’t suffer any social or judicial disabilities, when it comes to marriage, they had more rights than men. A woman could divorce her husband citing just his failure to provide love and moral support. Royal governors could be deposed by the Pharaoh just on account of their mistreatment of their wives. We also have a Biblical evidence of this equal social status of women in Egypt, in Exodus 2: ever wondered about the fact that in times when the Pharaoh decreed the killing of all Hebrew male children, his daughter saw no problem in sparing the life of one of those children? She even sent him away with his mother, so that he grew in his own home, safe from the Pharaoh’s henchmen. How could that happen? It could happen only because in Egypt, the word of a woman had the same power as the word of a man, and the word of the daughter of the Pharaoh could overpower even the Pharaoh’s edicts. The Talmudic rabbis also mention the high status of women in the Egyptian society, and even the fact that, unlike other culture, women in Egypt could take multiple husbands.

And, guess what. Egypt was also unique among the nations of the antiquity in that we have no evidence of sodomy being part of their culture. Of the vast number of extant original sources, we have only three or four mentions of anything close to sodomy, and they are vague enough to be interpreted in many different ways. In one of those stories, King Pepi II of the Sixth Dynasty (the Old Kingdom) is said to have visited one of his generals in the night hours, in secret. Even if the language is taken to mean sodomite relationship (which most egyptologists deny), the fact that even the king had to do it in secret clearly shows the attitude of ancient Egyptians to sodomy. The Talmudic rabbis also agree that male sodomy was not characteristic of Egypt; they attribute it rather to the Canaanitic cultures, which were highly patriarchal.

Clearly, then, we see a pattern even among the pagan cultures: the more patriarchal a culture is, the more prone to sodomy it is. And cultures that were egalitarian and held a high social status for women, even if they entertained other sins, were not prone to sodomy. Even among pagans, sodomy was not usually practiced, unless the society was patriarchal.

But these were pagans and their patriarchy was not Biblical. We now have Biblical patriarchy, under Christ, right? Well, not really. In another episode of Axe to the Root I talked about the church’s forgotten history of sodomite marriage, in the 14thcentury and the first half of the 15thcentury. This period of rampant sodomy came after a long period of elevated social status for men and diminished social status of women. It was, after all, the age of strong men, knights in shining armor who left their homes and went to fight against the infidels. It was a romantic age of religious orders of monks-warriors who swore loyalty to each other to death, and also that they would remain celibate. An age when women were relegated to a lower status, because they were unable to take arms and fight, and fighting was the only thing the culture was obsessed with. That age ended in rampant sodomy among the ruling classes, and in multiple disasters which decimated the population of Europe, and more important, decimated the ruling class and put an end to feudalism in Europe. During the 15thcentury, women increasingly took over the devastated European society and ran it. And by the time of Luther, sodomy was gone from most of Europe.

We see the same trend in action in Victorian England – another part of Christendom. During the 19thcentury, England had two separate and parallel cultures. One was the culture of the aristocracy: highly patriarchal and segregated. Schools for the aristocratic elite – Eton, Cambridge, Oxford – remained exclusive for boys until the first half of the 20thcentury. The English aristocracy was not subject to the English Common Law which established the judicial equality of men and women; it was under the Royal Law, which could be traced back to old pagan laws – mainly Roman and Saxon – and was intensely patriarchal. Women could not inherit estates and titles, and the only reason for them to be able to inherit the throne was political expediency for the reigning dynasty. On the other hand was the common population of England, the middle entrepreneurial class and the industrial workers. These were by necessity egalitarian: the Industrial Revolution demanded labor at rates higher than the market could supply, so all went to work, women and children together with husbands and fathers. Boys and girls mingled freely at an early age, working at factories and mines and offices; and then they mingled freely at union gatherings and in the pubs. Two cultures within the same nation, one strongly patriarchal, the other strongly egalitarian . . . and which culture do you think was given over to sodomy? That’s right, the patriarchal one. By the early 20thcentury, more than half of all aristocratic boys had at least some experience with sodomy acts, even if most of them didn’t go to the end to become full sodomites. Some did, however,, and from this era we have names like Lord Byron and John Maynard Keynes and multiple others. At the time when England’s lower and middle classes were producing missionaries and preachers, the aristocracy was digging deeper and deeper into the hole of iniquity. Patriarchy, again, produced sodomy. Egalitarianism produced stable families, even at times when men and women and children had to work 1-14 hours a day in the factories in order to get by. Just read about the early life of David Livingstone to get a glimpse of what it was.

Many of these famous British sodomites chose to travel frequently to Muslim lands in order to find partners for their lust. And for a good reason, for, contrary to our modern perceptions, Islam has historically been quite friendly to sodomy and sodomites. Some of the most expressive pieces of sodomitic literature and poetry have to us from Persian. Openly sodomite poetry was considered the highest expression of art in Persia, and poems were translated in English for high-class connoisseurs in England as early as the 1860s. In the neighboring Afghanistan, pederasty and sodomy are considered national tradition even today. (Goodle “the dancing boys of Afghanistan.”) And there is hardly any doubt that Muslim societies are hard-core patriarchal societies. Whatever issues they have, egalitarianism – in any meaning of that word – is hardly one of them.

As I mentioned earlier, it has become a habit for many Christian and conservative talkers to indulge in conspiracy theory and throw the blame for the “sexual revolution” and the modern dissolution of sexual morality upon the boogeyman of “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurt School. But there is one problem today. We have, in the 20thcentury, a nation that self-consciously rejected and opposed the influence of Marxism – including the “cultural” version – and the influence of Hollywood and modern media: South Africa. For two generations, under the apartheid, the white population was the most churched population in the world. Its government was officially Christian and even Reformed; it did everything in the name of Jesus Christ. (The apartheid was designed and introduced by a dutch Reformed minister who headed the government of the National Party in the 1950s.) In addition, the white culture of South Africa was self-consciously patriarchal – to the point that women did have to deal with certain social and political disabilities, many of which were encoded in the laws. (White women of South Africa often referred to themselves as “an inferior sex within a superior race.”) Take this, also: South Africa did not have television until 1975. And Hollywood movies were generally banned, except those that were deemed “clean” by the government’s censorship. A thoroughly churched population, an officially Christian government, an unapologetically patriarchal society, the influence of the Frankfurt School banned, Hollywood movies banned, no television, strong censorship . . . what could go wrong?

But it did go wrong. As early as the 1960s, the South African military realized that a great number of the young people (between 16 and 24 years of age) conscripted into the military had sodomite inclinations. Since this was deemed unacceptable, military commanders tried to deal with it in the typical military way: through brutality. Young sodomites were beaten, or forced to participate in group rape of Angolan or Namibian women. Some commanders simply grouped sodomites together in units in order to avoid further complications. In 1971, the military started the so-called Aversion Project with the purpose to heal young men of their sodomy. Thousands of young men were included in it for their sodomy. The project was based on the Pavlov theory and consisted of series of tortures (usually electrical shocks) designed to create aversion in the patients against sodomite desires. The tortures were so cruel that they left many people crippled for life, physically and psychologically. The worst cases, those deemed “hopeless,” were assigned to a sex-change surgery. Between 1971 and 1989, the South African government paid for more than 900 such surgeries. Given that the white population of South Africa at the time was only about 8 million, and that the patients were only a small segment of that population (young men between 16 and 24 years of age), we can easily conclude, first, that no other population group in history has had so many sex-change operations per capita, and, second, no other population group in history has had such a high rate of sodomy registered among its young males. Just stop and consider: 50 sex-change operations a year, only for young males between 16 and 24 years of age, of a total population the size of Virginia. And these were only the hopeless cases. No matter what you may think of South Africa and its supposedly Christian character, something was terribly wrong. And that terribly wrong thing was its patriarchalism.

Coming back to the US, let’s not forget that the modern wave of sodomite social activity came in the wake of the 1950s; it was the children of those parents who revolted against Biblical sexual morality. And when one studies the US culture of the 1950s, one things becomes very clear: the 1950s were the most patriarchalist decade in the history of the United States. The media of the time were full of articles, studies, and advertisements that employed self-consciously derogatory attitude to women. Some of the advertisements are mind-blowing, even those directed at women: showing a husband spanking his wife like a child because she didn’t do the shopping the right way, or a wife kneeling like a slave serving her husband. Church sermons didn’t fall far behind; some sermons of the time were deliberately disparaging of women. In hisInstitutes, pages 349-352, Rushdoony points out that such attitude to women came from the Enlightenment and affected the churches as well. The original feminist movement was not against Biblical ethics but against this revived pagan ethics of patriarchalism. The church failed to take the right side, and took the side of patriarchalism instead – and this is what led to the feminist movement being taken over by the enemies of God. The 1950s were the culmination of this patriarchalism in the society. And, as was to be expected from our historical experience, this inevitably led to a rise of sodomy. God is not mocked; you replace Biblical ethics with patriarchy, He lets your children turn over to sodomy.

And even a cursory look at the sodomite community today shows that it is very far from being “egalitarian” in any sense of this word. Women are not only not welcome or valued among sodomites, they are actively excluded. And the sodomite so-called “families” are strongly patriarchal and hierarchical – as is the sodomite community. There is no thought of any equality in any sense of that word. If anything, the most consistent patriarchalism today can be found among sodomites. They know what hierarchy is.

Of course, this is all historical evidence. But is it based on a solid logical analysis? Can we say for sure that the relation between patriarchy and sodomy is not simply correlational, but also causal? What is the mechanism by which patriarchy turns perfectly normal boys into future sodomites? What triggers these boys to switch to sexual lust toward other boys, instead of their natural list for women? (Which needs to be controlled, of course, but is at least natural.)

The answer should be obvious: any doctrine or social practice or custom that diminishes the social status of women to being inferior to, subservient to, or subjugated under men will inevitably produce a trigger for young boys to engage in sodomy. When men’s social status is elevated above that of women, then fellowship with men becomes more desirable than that with women. Their elevated social status creates an aura of loftiness and superiority around their relationships. Men, you know, can talk about hings that women are too stupid to understand, or too emotional, or too petty, or whatever else, you know all the stereotypes. Women are also weak, never direct, always manipulative, and they need supervision from men all the time, even when they go shopping to do chores around the house. In the family, Mom is always the one to retreat and concede, even when the kids can clearly see that Dad is being cruel, or unreasonable, or simply stupid; obviously, being the more powerful person pays off, and women are not worth befriending, since they can never project that power which makes Dad get what he wants all the time. When boys go to an all-boys school, or simply hang on in an all-boys company, it creates a bond that girls are not supposed to take part in. this leaves the impression that even if there is a future marriage in the life of a young man, it will have to take a second place, while his loyalty to his male friends will remain forever. I mean, look, where do we find glory but in being one of the band of brothers; whereas there is no glory in bragging about being friend to a girl. This attitude is still present to a great extent in the collectivist environment of the public schools in America: a boy who befriends girls is usually mocked by other boys. It is present in many churches in American where men tend to exclude women from any important conversation about the affairs or the future of the church. Patriarchy is a religion of power and submission; sodomy is also a religion of power and submission. In both, some human beings are relegated to a lower status. There is no philosophical difference between the two.

In such a culture where women are denigrated, or relegated to a status of permanent submission, or patronized as being too weak to take care of themselves or to take on activities and occupations that are reserved for men, boys will grow up with the psychology that relationships with women are low class, whereas relationships with men are higher class. From this, the step to elevating intimacy with other men to a higher status is very small. In fact. Plato’s Dialogues give us exactly that rationale for sodomy: sex with women is just for material purposes, for procreation. In a patriarchal society, it is also for status: I mean, you can’t be a patriarch like everyone else unless you have a wife and kids. So, procreation and status: two quite mundane purposes. Intimacy, or even sex, with men is a different thing altogether: it has a lofty, spiritual meaning, and therefore brings more pleasure. The same mentality is present in many places in Islam. The sodomite community in the US has developed that mentality to its logical end: they reject sex with women altogether. As Paul said in Romans 1, sodomy doesn’t come from making women equal. It comes from abandoning, pushing aside, ignoring women.

And that’s what a patriarchal culture always does. And the patriarchal culture that some churches have developed over the last several of decades in the US will inevitably lead to the same result. It is only a matter of time before it starts producing sodomy at a large scale.

What is the true Biblical solution to sodomy, then? It should be obvious: Adam’s first relationship was with a woman, not with other men. Contrary to what many imagine, it was not firstly and primarily sexual, in fact, sexual relationship is not mentioned until chapter 4 of Genesis. That relationship was his only friendship, Eve was his only confidant, the only person he could share his thoughts with, whether in terms of his professional work, or in terms of his recreation or religious activities. Eve was his equal in all respects; he had no other friends.

Translated into our modern society, this means that the solution to sodomy is elevating the status of women to the position of being equal to men. Not only judicially and politically and socially and in terms of job opportunities, but also psychologically. Fellowship and friendship with women – of course, in an ethically controlled and regular way – should be considered superior to friendship and fellowship with boys. After all, a boy is not expected to spend the rest of his life in a close intimate relationship with his male friends. His life will be spent being the best friend with a woman; and he must be prepared for it from an early age. That’s why I think that the practice of courtship is not Biblical, and is harmful: it leaves the impression that the ultimate relationship in a marriage is between the bridegroom and the father of the bride. Whereas such relationship is helpful to develop, the center must be on the fellowship and friendship between the future bridegroom and bride. When that is relegated to a lower level, this relegates the whole concept of family to a lower level. In order to fight sodomy, we need to have our boys seek friendship with girls, become trained in friendship with girls, and value friendship with girls above friendship with boys. Or, if you want a popular culture reference, this is the lesson Dr. Sean Maguire gave Will in the movie Good Will Hunting: when you meet The One, you give up your friends, you you give up everything, even your ticket to the most important Red Sox game ever. “I just slipped my ticket across the table and I said, sorry, guys, I gotta see about a girl.”

Some may object that the Bible doesn’t really emphasize the importance of such relationships and fellowship. I agree. It doesn’t. But it is only because the Bible takes them for granted. In fact, when we reads the Bible carefully about such cultural relationships between men and women, we will see that the Biblical society is much more egalitarian than even our modern American society. Of course, I can point to the fact that there is no law in the Old Testament that specifically elevates the fathers and leaves out the mothers. The Fifth Commandment mentions both. But even more important, where the sons are instructed to obey their parents, the mothers seem to be a priority. Isaac took his wife to his mother’s tent (Gen. 24:67). The famous verse in Proverbs 1:8 and 6:20, “keep the instruction of your father and the teaching of your mother,” the heavier word is used for the mother’s teaching: it is actually “torah,” the word for the Law of God. The word is not used for anything else but the Law of God and the instruction of the mother. (Even the law of the Persians in Daniel is not called “torah,” but a foreign word is used for it.)

But a much better testimony would be the cultural practices in the New Testament. And when we pay attention to them, we will find out that, in terms of men-women relationships, the Jewish culture of the first century was much freer than today. We don’t have much time to dig deeper, but consider this: a young single man made it His habit to stay at night at the house of two single young women, and no one in the society seemed to have any issue with it. This is Jesus, in Luke 10:38-42. Keep in mind, this was not a palace with many rooms. It was not a house in 20thcentury America. It was a house in a village the 1stcentury Israel; it probably didn’t even have rooms, and people slept in proximity that today would have been considered awkward, at the very least. We see the same free attitude to male-female relationships in Luke 7:36-39, the prostitute who was kissing Jesus’s feet in public. The Pharisees saw no problem with the behavior; their problem was that Jesus allowed a prostitute to touch Him in such an intimate way. To this we need to add the fact that Jesus was followed by a number of married women, and they used their wealth to support His ministry. In all respects, that society was much less patriarchal than ours today; and the relationships between men and women were considered equal to, and even more valuable than the relationships between men and men.

(Just as an interesting historical fact, the Reformed cultures of the 17thand the 18thcenturies encouraged such mingling of boys and girls rather than discourage it. They even had some practices that today would seem completely awkward and even improper to most Christians. One of them was “bundling”: a family would invite a boy who is a prospective date for their daughter, and would allow him to spend the night with her . . . bundled in a bag. Both youngsters would have their hands tied, and then their bodies would be bundled in bags, and then they would be left next to one another in bed, free to converse all night. The practice seems to have been common to the Reformed communities in Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, South France, Central Germany, and the American colonies. And there is no historical evidence of it being ever abused. Boys considered it the highest honor to be bundled, and bragged about it. Friendship with girls was far more valuable than friendship with other boys. And those cultures never developed sodomy, until the patriarchalism of the Enlightenment hit them. While I think such practices went a bit too far, and while I won’t recommend them to any Christian family, they still show us the importance these Reformed Christians attributed to developing men-women relationships and friendship from an early age.)

To summarize: patriarchy, by its very nature as a power religion, begets sodomy. Always. And it doesn’t matter if you want to add a label “Biblical” to it. And the only solution to sodomy is true egalitarianism: equalize the social status of women to that of men, and make boys value fellowship with women more tan they value relationship with other boys. And do it within the framework of the Dominion Covenant, of the family as the final goal and state of life for every young man, and the family as having the purpose of conquering the world, a man and his woman.

The book I will assign for reading this week is The Pink Swastika, by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. It is difficult for us today to imagine that such a masculine, power-oriented ideology like Nazism could have anything to do with sodomy. We were taught that the Nazis persecuted sodomites. This book will shatter than impression. The Nazis were much more given over to sodomy than most people today realize. The book may give you more insight into the psychology of sodomy than you might have bargained for. But it is necessary, if you want to understand the problem.

In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that lay out the application of the Gospel of Christ to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate.

Welcome to Episode 71 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to expose a religion that is as old as the Fall and yet always young and vigorous and new and coming under new forms and disguises and creeping into Christianity under many new excuses and emotional reasons; it is subtle and devious in its effects on our thinking, to the point that we not only don’t realize we are fully immersed in it but we also believe we are oh so righteous when we practice it and we presume to moralize on others as part of practicing it; and yet, when it slaps us in the face and we find ourselves on the wrong side of it, we complain loudly and we are so good at finding the right Biblical verses that expose it and oppose it . . . only to return to practicing it ourselves whenever we have the chance. It is a religion that often has no specific idols for worship, and even sometimes sneaks into our lives under the disguise of “strong and vigorous” Christianity, but in reality, it is more idolatrous than the worst superstitions of the most backward tribes in the corners of our world. And unlike those backward superstitions, it is quite rational, and quite appealing to the spirit of our age. Sometime ago, in a sermon, I heard Paul Washer admonishing his listeners to dig deeper and deeper into their consciences to discover the sin they hide there. I believe he is wrong in that admonition in the sense that a redeemed person needs to be focused on the Kingdom of God, not on his own navel, and certainly not waste his time in useless retrospection. In the process of building the Kingdom of God, God will continue bringing out in open our inner sins, in our actions and our words. Well, the religion I will be talking about has always laid out in open, and we have been way to eager to practice it openly. And it is about time for us to stop. (Have patience, stay with me, I will tell you later what that religion is.)

The responses to the question were, in their majority, as I expected: most people wouldn’t forgive a waiter anything even close to bad service” and, of course, bad service defined as lack of proper respect and homage. They wouldn’t leave tips unless they perceived they were treated as they deserved (I wonder if even some of the Christians remembered what they really deserved). Some posts reached the level of unbearable sanctimonious moralizing on waiters: quite easy, I guess, given that waiters” and especially waitresses” are about the lowest-status, most vulnerable working group in our society; waiting on tables is usually the last resort for those who have run out of other options.

What I noticed, also, was that the harshest and most vocal moralizers were, as a rule, the same people who would otherwise vote for the same politicians (on both sides of the spectrum), no matter how much they betrayed them. Those who are evangelicals and conservatives would justify Trump’s sexual escapades no matter how disgusting they are. Those who are leftist would justify and support Obama no matter what. All sides would support their government schools while bemoaning the worsening quality of education in those schools. All sides will look for excuses for the failures of their favorite government agencies (police, welfare, military, unions, regulatory, etc,) even when these government agencies commit obvious crimes. When it comes to men in power, all these people are quite eager to excuse, forgive, and forget. But wait until they get to a restaurant and they have to deal with some poor waitress. She better be perfect in making them feel important, or she will be going home penniless. A double standard, isn’t it. Actually, no. It is not a double standard. It is a fully consistent practical behavior, based on a fully consistent religion: the religion of power.

Power, therefore, is the ability to shape and re-direct reality to serve one’s purposes. This cosmological definition of”power” leads to our modern general definition of power: Power is the ability of a person or an institution to shape reality for certain purposes. It can apply to any kind of reality: spiritual, physical, economic, social, relational, even the reality of mental constructs and perceptions and interpretations. A strong muscular man is relatively powerful compared to other men or to women because he is capable of lifting or moving or breaking or bending things that other people are not capable of. A highly intelligent person is relatively powerful compared to others because he is capable of grasping the logical connections in the world” and acting on them in a way other people can’t. A person of influence and charismatic presence is relatively powerful compared to other people because he can muster the support or compassion or friendship of many in a way other people can’t. A rich person is relatively powerful compared to others because he can pay to convince others to serve him in a way other people can’t. Etc., etc. People of power can achieve the same results or goals with less effort than people without power” namely because their power makes them capable of moving and shaping reality better than other people.

What is important to understand here is that power is a privilege, and it is given from above. While power abilities still have to be developed through exercise, any exercise still must have something to work with. Exercise and training and self-discipline can make a person increase their ordinary abilities to levels above the ordinary. But even self-discipline is a supernatural gift of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). And then, also, we have supernatural gifts given to people, which the Greek text calls dunamis, meaning . . . well, powers. Why is this important to understand? Because when we discuss power in the society and among men, we need to understand that there is a covenantal aspect to it, of which we will be talking later. Power is not covenantally neutral; and therefore, our understanding of power and our exercise of power must always be within a covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial frame. Outside such frame, any use or non-use of power can be a violation of the covenant, and therefore a grounds for condemnation.

In an earlier podcast, when we talked about patent laws, I mentioned the fact that science was developed by Christian scientists with the purpose of making it a tool for our obedience to God in the Dominion Mandate. What was created as a tool, secularists then elevated as their god. (You heard that many times, I bet,”I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.”) And they believe that their idolatry of worshiping a tool makes them superior to those who worship the God behind both the tool and the world, which it was supposed to explore. There has been a greater idolatry at work among men, however, a worship of another, greater and more comprehensive tool. So great that science is actually only a part of that greater tool. That tool is power.

Very early in its history mankind learned that power could be used for the purposes of man in his rebellion against God. In fact, in the very second recorded act of sin in history, Cain resorted to power to resolve his problem with his brother. He shouldn’t have had a problem in the first place, given that the issue was between him and God, not between him and his brother. But even with the problem, God explained to Cain what the true solution to his problem was: ethics.”Why are you angry?”, God asked.”If you do good, you will be accepted; but if you don’t do good, sin is at the door. And you need to be master over your desire, not let it lord over you.” This has always been the Biblical solution to all problems of mankind, an ethical solution: Do good and control your desires. Cain gave the start to the fallen mankind’s solution to all problems: Instead of doing good, use the power given to you to solve your problems in your own way.

This trend of resorting to power continued in the line of Cain, and in all of mankind in general. Five generations after Cain, one of his descendants, Lamech, took two wives (a statement in itself of wielding superior power) and bragged to them of his solving a problem he had with a young man by resorting to the use of power, just like his ancestor Cain:”I have killed a man for wounding me; and a boy for striking me; if Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Gen. 4:23-24). (You can’t miss the irony of this macho man bragging to women about his power.)

The step from abusing a tool to turning that tool into an idol and worshiping it is never too big. There’s a number of such examples in the Bible, one of the clearest ones being the brass serpent Moses raised in the wilderness (Num. 21:9) which was later raised as an idol (2 Kings 18:4). Well, guess what, power, that tool given to man to use in his service to God in subduing the earth, was also destined to be elevated to a divine status. That may have happened even before the Flood, although we don’t have any specific indications in the Word about it. The specific indication of men worshiping power as such came after the Flood, in Genesis 11.

Yes, that’s what Babel was. While many preachers today try to see in the Tower of Babel some modern type of elite conspiracy for one-world government, the text says nothing of the sort: Babel was a local government, and it did not include all the people all over the earth. The text says nothing about a one-world government, nor does it speak of government at all, or of an elite. These were just ordinary people who gathered there, and were afraid of being”scattered,” and decided to create something to stay together and to make themselves a name. What they tried to create was not a government but a religion; the language of”reaching into heaven” is inescapably religious language throughout the Bible. (See, for example, Gen. 28:12: the language of”reaching into heaven” is not just similar, it is identical in Hebrew to the language in Gen. 11:4.) The men worked to establish a common worship, first and foremost; reaching heaven meant that they were trying to establish a new religion and a new worship. But who was the god of that new religion? You need to have a god to worship, after all. The god is not mentioned in the text. But we can grasp who the god was if we trace the city of Babel earlier, in the previous chapter. In Gen. 10:8-14, Babel is said to have been the beginning (in Hebrew, rosh, the head, or also, the capital) of the kingdom of Nimrod, the first one to become a mighty one on the earth. The men who gathered at Babel, gathered to be under the power of a mighty man, and wanted to build a shrine. The shrine was meant to make them a name, just like in the previous chapter, in verse 9, Nimrod had a reputation, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The center of worship, therefore, must have been not some made up god, but the power and might of man, as both the divine substance in man, and the savior of man. The men’s intent was to show the world that they could overpower even God the Creator. That such was their intention is obvious from God’s words,”nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible to them” (v. 6). The word”impossible” there has its root in the word batser, which means”fortified.” (For example, the same word is used in Deuteronomy 9:1,”great cities fortified to heaven.”) Nothing would be fortified against these people, they would be all-powerful. And the Tower would be the temple of their power, one that would reach up to heaven and would give men access to what had been barred to them since Genesis 3. That cherubim with the flaming sword would soon become toast before the new and powerful god, humanity. God barred man from the Garden because of ethics; man will force his way back into the Garden through power.

God broke the power of men by breaking their understanding of each other, and with it, their unity which was the source of their power. Today, there are all kinds of bizarre and imaginative and anachronistic interpretations of what happened there, and we will cover the Tower of Babel in another episode. The reality, however, from the text, is that what God did was break the back of the power religion men were trying to build in opposition to Him and His religion. He did not postulate division among mankind forever, as some heretical teachings have it; unity is good and it is unity, not division, that is the true normative state of mankind. He declared the wickedness of their power religion and showed how He would deal with it every time humans try to set up such religion against Him” destroy their unity. His target was power religion, not unity. And it is power religion that unredeemed mankind has always had in its heart, throughout history.

Men did not stop there, however; they continued lusting after power. And they continued lusting after power in the same way as they started: by trying to establish collectives and hierarchical structures based on power. I won’t go into a lot of details about it; you need to listen to my lecture of four years ago before the Kuyper Foundation,”The Sovereignty of God or the Sovereignty of the State.” (It is on Youtube somewhere.) After Babel, men continued trying to set up collectives with the purpose of accumulating power, and dominating other men. The history of mankind is a long list of wars between different religions of power. And, in the midst of all these wars, God also intervened with His religion of ethics, and waged war on all of man’s religions of power.”The kings of the earth take their stand,” says Psalm 2,”and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed.” God laughs at them, and deals with them in exactly the same way He dealt with the religion of power at Babel: He breaks them up:”You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware.” No matter what false religion the fallen man takes up, it is always a religion of power; it is always an attempt to rule over his fellow man, an image-bearer of God, and through that, rule over God. In the final battle between God and man, in Revelation 13 and forward, the enemy of God is the Beast, and what is that Beast main characteristic? Power.”Who is like the beast, and who is able to wage war with him?” (Rev. 13:4).

Because this worship of power, this lust after power is a religion in its own, it has certain religious tenets. Namely, that power is good, and all who have power are by necessity good and righteous. But even worse, the lack of power is considered to be a proof of ethical deficiency. This is to be expected, of course, given that a closer relationship with your god is always a sign of greater piety. If power is your god, having power means you are spiritually superior to those who don’t have power. Thus, the people in a lower social position are by necessity guilty for their lack of power; and therefore, the burden of the laws you create will be on them, on those who do not have power. We should expect such a religion of power, therefore, to be more concerned with how we treat those on the social ladder above us, rather than the least among us.

And guess what. This is what our modern society has become. We have become a society which legislates, to the minutes detail, how inferiors are supposed to treat their superiors. And when I say”legislates,” I don’t mean simply the laws that come out of our legislatures. I mean also the overall customs and mores in our society, the social habits expressed in the media and especially on social media. I mean also the teaching in our schools. I mean the teaching in our families. And last, but worst of all, I mean the teaching in our churches, coming out of our pulpits. We, and our whole society, are all obsessed with power religion, and are under the spell of a power religion.

Look at our laws. From beginning to end, our laws are not concerned with anything else but the relation of the individual to the state” which means, to the most powerful institution in the society. Government bureaucrats control so much power” including firepower” and thus, they are really the most powerful group. And that without any real service. All of their power is predicated on their ability to jump through bureaucratic hoops. And the majority of our laws are focused not on the protection of individual citizens, but on the protection of government bureaucrats from those citizens. Just look at the laws protecting those who project power, the cops; there are special laws that allow cops to do what no individual citizen is allowed to do” from the kinds of weapons cops can use, all the way to the legal privilege of cops to kill individual citizens without legal repercussions. Politicians are also well protected from the consequences of their own laws; remember, while Congress was passing Obamacare, Congressmen were careful to pass a completely different healthcare law for themselves, one that allowed them to live off taxpayers” money forever. The same principles apply not only to the federal government but to all local governmentts as well. There are more laws to protect local bureaucrats against taxpayers than there are to protect taxpayers against bureaucrats. Every time there is a decision by a government body to tax or regulate more, it is final; every time there is a successful appeal by private citizens, it is only temporary, until the next legislative session, or until the next bucreaucratic regulation, which always annuls the appeal. In all their laws, all levels of government are concerned only with how the less powerful should treat the more powerful, not the other way around. Look at the special privileges for police. Back in Eastern Europe, under Communism, we knew the definition of tyranny: Tyranny was when the laws gave special privileges to the powerful of the day. And what do we have today in the US? We have laws that allow cops to do things that no private citizen would be allowed to do without going to jail or having to spent tons of money on fines or legal fees. While cops get away even with murder committed in broad daylight, in the view of all, and even recorded on camera. Because men in power are more important than everyone else.

In fact, in the developments of the last decade in the US, laws have been changed not only to ignore the weakest members of the society, but also to actively punish everyone who decides to help them, out of the goodness of their hearts. Almost all big cities now have regulations that ban private citizens from setting up private soup kitchens; to set up one, one has to go through multiple regulations and requirements, and the final cost is so high that the value of the money and time lost to the government far outweigh the value of the foods distributed to the poor. Thus, even in charity, the government considers itself needier than the poorest people in the community; if you want to feed the poor, you first need to feed” or, rather, enrich” the most important people, the rulers, and then you can move to helping the poor.

But why blame the government and its legislators when our whole political system is based on a power religion, starting from the voting booth. Our whole political system is a power religion applied to practice. It presupposes that ethics” issues of good and evil” in the society are best decided on the basis of who can get the greatest number of votes behind them. That’s the very definition of democracy as a political system. Which means, whoever has the power of numbers gets to declare good and evil; that means, he gets to be a god. That’s as much a power religion as you can find it anywhere. And don’t make the mistake ot believe that Republicans are any different than Democrats in this respect; as much as Republicans swear they are not for democracy but for a republic, in practice, there is no difference between the two political constituencies; both believe that whoever has the power of of the greater vote should have the power to determine good and evil by the stroke of the legislative pen. Democrats would force us all to be good by compulsory re-distribution of wealth, Republicans would force us all to be good by supporting government schools or bombing foreign countries to democracy. Democrats would declare a criminal anyone who doesn’t want to participate in government healthcare or has a gun; Republicans would declare a criminal anyone who crosses a border without asking federal bureaucrats (mainly Democrat) for permission. Etc. At every level, in every details of their respective political views and practices, both major sides of the political spectrum are devoted worshipers of power. A true republic, namely, a restraint on power under a transcendent, Divine Law that is independent of the whims and agendas of men in power, has never been the ideology of either party, even of that which has the largest number of churchmen in it.

Not to mention, of course, our foreign policy, which is entirely predicated on intimidation and the use of power. It has been a long time since the United States had a foreign policy based on ethics and service. Even where, on the surface, our government distributes foreign aid, it is not real service to the needs of the local population; it is our bribe to local powerful men to take the right side in the international struggle for power, and to keep their populations subjugated.

Such policy of oppressing and subjugating foreign nations abroad is paralleled by our own attitude towards our minorities at home. Objectively speaking, ethnic minorities are always the weaker partner in all ethnic or racial relations, when we speak of groups. (They are minorities, for crying out loud.) And yet, somehow, everything is their fault, no matter what they do. Blacks, who are statistically less wealthy and live in more isolated communities, are by default lazy, deadbeat dads, improvident and what not. You know,”Where are the fathers?” Jews, who are wealthy, family-oriented, and community-organized, are by default cunning, corrupt, conspiratorial, treacherous, etc. Immigrants who are looking for nothing more than finding a better life for their kids, are by default here only to take advantage of welfare, or do voting fraud, or are trying to subvert the political system, etc. It is always those that are different, and always the minorities. You never hear ethnic majorities entertain similar stereotypes about the majorities themselves; they are always honest, sincerely naive, faithful, entrepreneurial, minding their own business, never envious or wanting other people’s money, never using welfare . . . you know the routine. It is always these smaller groups that are the rascals and the scoundrels. That was the case when I grew up in Bulgaria” us the Bulgarian ethnic majority were always the good guys, and you could never trust the rest. Same here in America: Us white Anglo-Saxon-Scottish-Irish good, them Asians, Blacks, Pollacks, Italians, Greeks and whatever other minority you pick, bad. And in the midts of all this, we have people who write public declarations to”All the Conquered Peoples,” just suck it up, we are more powerful. And then the same people complain of immigration, because it is”invasion” and it turns them into a “conquered people.” Etc.

The religion of power is not limited to the political or social realm, though. We have been practicing it in our families as well. Recently, I suggested on Facebook that in the Kingdom of God, true authority is not defined by nor based on ontology or on institutional power but on service. That, at least, should be a given among Christians, and especially among Reformed and Reconstructionist Christians, that dominion is through service; what could be more obvious than that? And yet, the proposition raised a storm of indignation among a number of Christians and church-goers:”Are you saying that our women should rule over us, in the family and in the church?” I, of course, never suggested anything about rule or institutional power; my arguments have always been about”authority” as a spirutual reality independent of any kind of power, physical or institutional. In my article,”Modern Presbyterianism and the Destruction of the Princople of Plurality of Elders,” I wrote clearly of the difference between power and authority, and said that ordination does not confer authority, it only grants institutional power. And yet, the institinctive reaction of so many Christians was not to think of terms of service but in terms of who has the power to force others to submit. The rise of patriarchalism in the last two decades, especially in Reformed circles, is another evidence of the religion of power: behind the pious rhetoric, the final appeal is to power and submission, not to service and ethics. Service and ethics are only a secondary product of the basic frame of power relationships in the family. The same applies to ecclesiology: the church is defined not by public profession of faith, as it is in the Westminster Confession, but by its power structure. And that even against the constitutions of most modern Presbyterian denominations which explicitly declare that chuch government is not necessary for the existence of the church. And yet, modern churchmen routinely declare those professing Christians who are not subject to the same power structures as they have set up as”not belonging to the church.” (Ironically, the modern Reformed have adopted the Roman Catholic notion of the”mother church.”) Most of the practices and teachings in the modern churches do not differ in ethics than the legislation of the modern socialist state: they are all focused on how the ordinary church members are supposed to treat the ecclesiastical elite. It is not surprising that in this ecclesiastical context abuse” and especially sexual abuse” thrives. A power religion will always seek to find excuses for the powerful, and in sexual abuse there is always a powerful side and a powerless side. In that rape case at John MacArthur’s university, it was predictable that the victim would be required to withdraw her accusation against the rapist: he was on the staff, that is, one of the elite, and she was was nobody. The men in power are always to be protected, and those least ones are always to be sacrificed for the plans and purposes of those in power. At every level in our society, we pay lip service to Christianity and to its ethics; but in reality, in almost everything we do or believe or speak, we are subject to a religion of power. Power is always what attracts us, power is always what makes bow down, and while seeking solutions to the problems of our society, we always resort to the question: Who rules and who submits? We very seldom ask the question,”What kind of ethics, and what kind of service resolves the real problems in our society?”

So, what is the antithesis? What is the Biblical view of the fundamental ethics of the Kingdom of God? As Christians, what will separate us from the world, what will show the world that we bring a completely different faith, one that turns the world upside down?

Recently, the 22-year-old daughter of a dear friend of mine passed away, after fighting two major illnesses for years. She went through a ton of trials and tribulations and disappointments in her earthly life, but to the last minute, she kept her faith in Christ. At the memorial worship service, her father, while giving his testimony of her life, said this: “At any party, she would find and befriend the greatest losers, the misfits of the party. And she would treat them as if they were the kings of queens of the party.” Amazingly, she herself was a strong and powerful personality; she could be the heart and soul of any party if she wanted. And yet, she used her power to uplift and encourage and entertain the least.

This kind of behavior always feels insticntively good to us, but we seldom stop to think why it is good. The answer is: it is good because that’s the Biblical approach to practical ethics. Contrary to many sermons and practices in the churches today” especially in the so-called “Reformed” churches at the heart of Christianity is not how we treat the powerful of the day. At the heart of our faith and religion is how we treat the least among us. In fact, when Jesus described in detail how the Final Judgment would look like, that’s exactly what He said about the criteria for judgment. A full quote of His words is worth our time:

“But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.”All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

“Then the King will say to those on His right,”Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.””Then the righteous will answer Him,”Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink?”And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You?”When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?””The King will answer and say to them,”Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.”

“Then He will also say to those on His left, “Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.””Then they themselves also will answer,”Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?” “Then He will answer them, “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.””These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matt. 25:31-46)

Very clearly, Jesus establishes a contrast between the power religions of His day, and the care for the”the least of these.” In His Kingdom, and at His Final Judgment, the hierarchy of values is flipped upside down: the most important people in the society are the least of these, not the greatest of these. In the Old Testament, the Law was specifically concerned with three categories: the orphan, the widow, and the stranger” being the weakest members of the society. There was a special protection in the law for poor people, and even special privileges for them in the case of taking loans” charity loans were under a special heading. God warned the Israelites against oppression many times:”if the stranger, or the orphan, or the widow cry to Me because of your oppression, I will hear them, and I will make your children orphans and your wife a widow.” God didn’t believe in impartial justice. His justice was very specificaly partial, and it was skewed in favor of the weakest members of the society.

The apostle James repeated Jesus’ principle about who the most important people are in Christianity:”Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). And Jesus Himself declared multiple times that the world of power structures and submission is the world of the pagans. As far as Christians are concerned, their world will have to be based on service, not on power, and not on obsession with authority (Luke 22:25-26). In the final account, our service to the lowest among us will determine the strength of our faith. That is where true Christianity is.

So when you are powerful in any area, your power must be spent on helping the least of these. If you do not spend at least part of it there, you better not exercise it for anything else, for you would be surely wasting it.

To return to the question asked at the beginning: “Is it immoral to refuse to tip bad service?”

The answer is: No, it isn’t. What is immoral, however, is your obsession with how people serve you. What is immoral is your obsession with power and submission, and your desire (often subconscious) to boss and moralize upon those less powerful and les fortunate than you, while you excuse lying politicians and brutal cops. It is true that, from time to time, there will be a lazy or immoral waiter who would just mess up everything because he doesn’t care. But in all the cases where you treat someone perceivably lower than you on the social ladder, your treatment of them is being recorded. And will be played back to you in that final court. Looking back, I personally have a lot to cover me under a thick blanket of shame and guilt. I am sure everyone of us does, given that we have been under the influence of the previling power religions. It is time for this to change, and the change to start from our own behavior. Because if we don’t get this ultimate question right, we won’t get anything else right.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Truth and Transformation, by Vishal Mangalwadi. You know the author already. If you don’t, he was born in India, and he converted. He knows the Indian culture to minutest detail, and he knows the West that was shaped by Christianity. And Mangalwadi knows exactly how our world was shaped by the Bible, and what needs to be done to repair it.

Welcome to Episode 70 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes you and I will try to bring correction to a very significant failure of moral character in American Christianity: namely, the question of guilt. Even more precisely, how much guilt have we incurred, and how much guilt should we, as Christians, be willing to assume, if we are to bring our nation to repentance and our churches to revival. We will look at the Biblical principles for accepting responsibility, and for the Biblical principles of repentance.

And when we do that, we may find out that with churches at every corner, and with seminaries in every city, and sermons on the radio and TV in every state and county, we have strayed far away from the Biblical view on these things.

Before I get to the point, let me share a story. Roll back to 1992, when I had to be present, unwillingly, at a pre-trial inquiry. I was graduating from the Bulgarian Naval Academy in Varna, and I was assigned to an anti-submarine ship as commanding officer of Battle Station 1 (or Battle Post 1), which, under the designation of the Warsaw Pact (still used by Bulgaria in 1992), meant the navigation room and all the navigational equipment of the ship. Just within a month after I reported for duty, an accident happened on our ship: during maintenance, a depth charge was left loose and it rolled overboard. That happened while the ship was berthed, so the depth charge fell in the shallow water of the harbor, where there were more than three dozen other ships berthed as well, not to mention ground and underwater communication lines, ammunition stores nearby, vehicles parked, boats, etc.

By regulations, drum depth charges are stored without their detonators (those are screwed on and adjusted to specific depth just a few minutes before their actual use in combat or training), so there wasn’t any immediate danger. And yet, the matter was serious, even if for the miniature probability of explosion. A depth charge of that type is about the largest single explosive you will find on a ship; all the others (missiles, torpedoes, artillery charges) have to be delivered to the enemy over long distances, so their size is usually limited. A drum depth charge is just rolled off the stern, or shot at a very short distance with a mortar-type canon (it looks like a giant hammer when it flies in the air, due to a special “handle” attached to it), so it doesn’t have the same limitations on weight and size as those for the other weapons. It is so powerful that when the ship drops it in the water and it explodes after several minutes, the hit wave is felt on the ship itself like a giant hammer hitting it, even if the ship is quarter of a mile away. (Imagine what it is for the submarine.) After all, it is a depth charge; it is supposed to go deep and create a hit wave in the highly resistant environment of water under pressure. Imagine what it is if it explodes in the shallow waters of a harbor. Actually, just go to YouTube and search for depth charge explosion. Anyway, back to the story.

Depth charges were under Battle Station (or Battle Post) 3, which included mines, torpedoes, and depth charges (anything meant to explode underwater, unlike artillery and missiles which exploded above the water), and the commanding officer of Battle Station 3 was a friend of mine who had graduated from the same Naval Academy 5 or 6 years prior. At the time of the incident, however, my friend wasn’t on the ship. The mishandling of the depth charge was committed by one of his sergeants responsible for the maintenance, and a couple of seamen with him. So the common perception was that in that pre-trial inquiry, my friend would be off the hook, and the blame would be thrown on the sergeant. The people that would be indicted, if the case went to trial, would be his direct subordinates.

The panel of the inquiry (one deputy military prosecutor and two ship commanders of the same base) called first for my friend to testify. I guess, since he was perceived to be clear of guilt, they wanted his testimony at the beginning. Besides, he was an officer of perfect reputation: he had a high work ethic, and his technical knowledge of his specific field was at a very high level. As both a commanding officer and a trusted technical expert on depth charges and their maintenance, he was expected to lay down the foundation for everyone’s understanding of what such maintenance involved, and whether there could be any guilt assumed, or at least criminal negligence ascribed.

My friend’s testimony surprised all of us, however. He did indeed give us in short the framework to understand how that maintenance worked and how it was supposed to be done. At some point, however, he switched to the responsibility of the commanding officer and the technical specialist – both combined in his person and position – to train their crew to perform that maintenance. He went into a great detail as to how many hours of training they should do, what specific kinds of training with both the weapons and their maintenance, what sort of auxiliary technical training and study hours, how many hours of direct teaching by the commanding officer or the technical expert himself, etc., etc. While laying out all these regulations and requirements, he also started comparing them to his own work so far. At first, I couldn’t figure out why he was giving all this information; neither did the panel; they told him he didn’t have to. But my friend insisted. At some point it dawned on me that he was actually throwing the blame on himself. He repeatedly emphasized how his training of his crew fell short of what could be assumed to be good practice or common sense, even if it was within the limits of Navy regulations. He mentioned multiple examples of perfect work and good work ethic shown by the sergeant in question. He showed how he himself had failed to emphasize some central concepts and actions during maintenance so that his people could build the necessary habits and skills. By the end of his testimony, he had used the witness stand to present a picture which incriminated himself and cleared his subordinates of any wrongdoing, or even of negligence. His crew did the best they could according to their best knowledge. And if their best knowledge came short, it was his fault as their superior.

I don’t think I had ever seen anything like that before, and neither have I seen anything like that since. And I was not the only one astonished. The panel was visibly perplexed. I am sure that prosecutor wanted to take the case to court. (How else would he justify his money?) But if he did, he couldn’t ignore the first and foundational testimony in the inquiry. And what if he pressed charges against my friend? There was a still a chance he could win the case against my friend, but that would mean that he would destroy the career of an officer who was regarded as a good asset. And the rest of the panel, being commanding officers themselves, were not willing at all to indict one of them who had put himself in the harm’s way in what was obviously an attempt to protect his subordinates. Communist – or former Communist – militaries are not and have never been the epitome of ethics, but even in that environment there was still some awareness of honor. And what my friend did was considered “honorable,” even if most of the people present would choose a different course in his situation. (Just as a disclaimer, I consider a culture of honor and shame to be a pagan culture, as opposed to the Biblical culture which is a culture of ethics. But that for a future episode.)

The rest of the inquiry was quite short; I don’t think the panel themselves were comfortable digging into it too much. A few days later, as most of us expected, the panel made the decision to not indict anyone. A few reprimands were issued, a few recommendations were submitted to the commanding officers involved, and the case was dismissed. When I talked to my friend about it, he shrugged and said he never really expected to be indicted. But there was still some probability that his testimony would be used against him, so why did he do it? He wasn’t perfectly sure why; he just knew that it was the right thing to do, to take the blame for his subordinates. He also wanted to make sure that he could look them in the eyes after all this was over; to abandon them in such an important moment would mean they couldn’t trust him in the future, and therefore he couldn’t trust them either. So his motivations were not really clear even to himself; he just vague felt this was the right way to go. To all of us who were there, it was also vaguely obvious it was an honorable act, although we didn’t know why.

My friend was not a Christian, and I was less than two years old in the faith. I didn’t know anything about Covenant Theology, and I didn’t know anything about the judicial aspect of the faith, or of intercession, or anything else whatsoever. Only many years later, reminiscing on the experience, I realized that in what happened in that room that day, God gave me an earthly picture of Christ’s redemption. But we’ll look at Christ’s example later.

I can’t say this experience had a formative influence on my view of guilt and responsibility; I would say it was rather one of many factors. But over the years I developed the feeling that a Christian is not supposed to measure down his guilt to the ounce; to the contrary, he should be willing to assume more responsibility rather than less; and therefore, a Christian should not shy from assuming more guilt that he has directly incurred with his actions. I say feeling, because it was rather vague; I couldn’t really provide any theological or exegetical case if I was asked. Like my friend, I just felt it was the right thing and the honorable thing to do. Perhaps there was also some pragmatic consideration, same as what my friend had when he said, “I didn’t really expect for them to indict me.” I guess if you asked me why I would be repenting for sins I haven’t committed, my answer would be that if I was in error, I would be on the safe side of that error: better repent for more sins than needed than for fewer. After all, assuming more guilt won’t make me more accused in God’s court, but assuming less guilt may make me liable in God’s court. Another factor was that in the Charismatic circles I was moving in my first years of the faith, we spent lots of time praying and intercedingfor both individuals and for the nation as a whole. And intercession by its very definition requires that you identify with the person or the group you intercede for. (That’s why Jesus had to be born in a human body.) This identifying inevitably faces you with the necessity to identify with their sins as well and repent for them. (And I will show later that there is actually deep Biblical theology behind this, contrary to the knee-jerk responses of some modern so-called “Reformed.”) Another factor is also that I was reading more and growing more in the knowledge of Covenant Theology, and I was beginning to understand the judicial aspect of the faith, and with it, the judicial applications of guilt, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. But in all this, remember, it was an unbeliever who first demonstrated to me the Christian way of dealing with guilt and responsibility. Even if he didn’t know that that’s what he was demonstrating.

Until I met the reality in the American churches, where the mentality is exactly the opposite.

My first encounter with the views on guilt and responsibility in the American churches was back in 2003 when I had a conversation over dinner with two of my elders. I was a member of a Presbyterian church at the time. The church was explicitly Christian Reconstructionist by its very articles of faith and by its mission statement; not just broadly “Reformed,” which these days simply means, in reality, “Pietist and Spiritually Dead, but Theologically Correct on the Narrow Topic of Salvation.” (That’s what 99% of the so-called “Reformed” churches in this nation are.) Officially, the church had a comprehensive covenantal view of reality. Until that conversation, I perceived my elders had the views they professed in the church’s constitution. The conversation shattered that perception. We talked about many different topics of politics, justice, social action, etc., and by the end I knew that while my elders had a mental knowledge of Reformed theology and even Christian Reconstruction, their applied ideology was no different that the run-of-the-mill neo-conservative socialism of the surrounding culture. To make a long story short, we got to the issue of some immoral things done by the United States in their foreign policy – perhaps not as bad as what Germany or Japan or the Soviet Union or the United Kingdom have done, but still deserving some sort of acknowledgment and repentance or apology – and I discovered that I my elders’ view, no president should apologize for America, and America should not apologize for any of her actions, even if they were admittedly wicked. I was rather shocked; until that time, I thought such aversion to admitting guilt and responsibility was a character trait limited to the socialists (former Communists) in Eastern Europe who flatly refused to issue any kind of apology or repentance for the crimes of the Communist regimes. I would certainly not imagine that a Christian would be so averse to apology and repentance, let alone Reformed elders?

It was then when I heard for the first time the phrase “false guilt.” They couldn’t be held responsible for someone else’s actions, let alone their government’s actions; that would be “false guilt.” (On the other hand, they believed that killing non-combatants in war – like at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was justified because they are solidarily responsible for the crimes of their governments. That is, one standard for Americans, another for everyone else.) So, it would be “false guilt,” and “false guilt” was something very bad. Thus, more than anything else, they wanted to be careful not to assume “false guilt.” So every assumption of guilt – individual or corporate – had to be strained as precisely as possible, examined to minutest detail, so that they were sure that every ounce of guilt that was ascribe to them was really theirs. Again, these were “Reformed” elders, exhibiting mentality that in Eastern Europe is associated with Communists and socialists.

I was disappointed, of course, and, as you may reckon, this conversation served me as an eye-opener to the really low standards for elders in the “Reformed” churches in America. At the time, however, I imagined this aversion to assuming guilt and apology may have been limited to some people. But it wasn’t. I encountered it again. For some time, I was moving in the circles of the Federal Vision theology – don’t ask me why, I was young and stupid, and it took me a while to see through the corruption and hypocrisy and sometimes sheer lunacy of the leaders of that movement. One of the first signs something was not right was when they started spreading a new view on abortion: namely, that abortion was not a Christian concern, it was just the covenant-breakers killing off their offspring. Why should Christians be worried about the death of the non-elect? (You know, because you can be sure those murdered babies are all non-elect, I reckon.) At one Q&A session, when this issue was raised, I asked if, given that a nation under the same government is considered a covenantal – that is, “federal” – entity, Christians, as members of that covenantal entity would be solidarily responsible for the murders of infants in that nation, under that government. I was given a mixture of cheap wittiness and meaninglessness (which is the literary standard for all Federal Vision theologians), which, boiled down, meant, “No, Christians are not accountable for the murders of infants in the culture. After all, we are not the ones doing the murders.” So much for the “federal” part of Federal Vision. Again, there was this aversion to admitting guilt. It’s somebody else’s fault.

Then the scandals about Doug Wilson’s plagiarism happened. I was not awfully surprised, to be honest. Plagiarism has been a common phenomenon in Reformed circles in the last 100 years. Francis Schaeffer was the greatest culprit; he prodigiously borrowed ideas and even direct paragraphs from original Reformed authors of his time – including Van Til and Rushdoony and North and Bahnsen – and sold them as his own thoughts without giving as much as a line of acknowledgment to the original authors. On a smaller scale, I have caught theologians like R.C. Sproul or John Robbins do the same. Wilson, after all, is not even a theologian; he is rather a salesman. So his plagiarism was not that much of a surprise to me.

What was surprising, however, is the way the whole scandal was treated. One particular case was quite close to me, because it involved Pastor Randy Booth, whom I personally know. He was listed as a co-author of a book, (I think the title was A Justice Primer). Randy is a man of some standing in his Federal Vision circles, but he is certainly not a man of Wilson’s influence. Wilson is way more powerful and influential. (And power and influence mean everything in the institutional churches.) Under the principles of conduct I described above, and my friend demonstrated, I would expect that Douglas Wilson would have taken the blame for the plagiarized sections – the greater guy should carry the burden for the lesser guy. Besides, I somehow can’t imagine that Wilson didn’t even know about the plagiarism ahead of time. But instead of Wilson taking the blame – even if it was just to protect Randy’s name – both Wilson and Canon Press threw the blame completely on Randy Booth. Now, even if that was true, even if Randy Booth acted completely independently of Wilson and Wilson didn’t have any control over the process – which is very highly improbable – it would still be more ethical and honorable for Wilson to take the blame.

So again, there was this aversion to acknowledging guilt. Again, in what is supposed to be a “Reformed” church leader.

Do the examples end there? Not at all. The same spirit of denying guilt or measuring guilt down to the ounce is everywhere, in everything around us, and that especially in the American churches. And especially in the churches who are professedly Reformed. I will give one more example of it, very pertinent to our situation today, and very pertinent to our efforts at Christian Reconstruction of our society.

In October 2016, Joel McDurmon published one of the most strategic books on American history produced by a Christian Reconstructionist author: The Problem of Slavery in Christian America. It is strategic, because it takes Christian Reconstruction to a field that has not been treated before: the church’s complicity in the national sin of slavery. Christian Reconstructionist authors have treated the general topic of slavery before (Gary North has a really long chapter on it in his commentary on the case laws in Exodus 21-40). They have also treated the specific case of chattel slavery in America. But Joel’s contribution is that he applied to it the principle of 1 Pet. 4:17, “it is time for judgment to begin with the Household of God.” Joel’s book is also unique in its covenantal, ethical/judicial approach to the subject. So far all the books on American slavery have been written on the principles of identity politics: either eulogizing Lincoln and ignoring the sins of the North, or eulogizing Robert E. Lee, Dabney etc., and downplaying the evils of slavery. Joel refused to identify with either the North or the South; he identified with the Kingdom of God, and exposed the wickedness of both political sides, but also the wickedness of the institutional churches. The book didn’t come in a vacuum, however. It was the product of the work of several of us to develop Christian Reconstruction in the direction of applied righteousness and justice to the immediate issues of our day; and racism and racial justice are part of that larger context of applied justice.

Several other issues needed to be raised in that context. The listeners to Axe to the Root will remember that we covered the issue of racism as an anti-covenantal ideology, also of the specific problem of institutional racism of theinjustice system in the US, and I also talked about the ethical issue of white privilege. There were other issues as well, raised by other authors; one of them the thorny, but important issues of reparations to the black community. After all, no matter how indignant we get on the issue of reparations, it is still true that black families were unlawfully and immorally exploited in the slavery, and were paid no restitution for their time as slaves. On top of it, they were then unlawfully and immorally segregated and oppressed for several generations, and that oppression and segregation was maintained by official laws. This deprived them of the opportunity to accumulate and pass on wealth their children. In comparison, the white community profited from the slave labor, and then from the segregation, and was able to pass on wealth. No matter what our personal emotions tell us when we hear the word “reparations,” our sense of justice should tell us that these are crimes in the Law of God, and we will either have to find a solution, or we will be judged as a nation.

Then Joe Salant did a podcast on this issue where he laid most of it. Keep in mind, these issues should not sound radical to Christian Reconstructionists; after all, we are the ones who look at the Law of God and evaluate everything based on issues of righteousness and justice. And yet, believe it or not, there still were Christians – and even Reformed elders – who took offense at what Joe Salant said, and harshly criticized him. And what was their problem with his words?

That he was forcing false guilt on them. They didndunuting. Someone else is to blame for slavery and segregation and for their consequences today. Someone else is to blame for the institutional racism of our injustice system. So, if Joe wanted to be accepted by them, he needs to measure their guilt down to the ounce. And they should only be responsible for precisely what their personal guilt is. Not an ounce more. And these are Reformed elders.

No need to continue; you get the picture. And you probably get why I would be so disappointed. Many years ago, I witnessed an unbeliever who had only a vague feeling of what was good and moral and honorable, take the blame for other people and put his career on the line, when he didn’t have to do it. And for the last 20 years I have been witnessing Reformed Christians – and even elders! – constantly fighting against the boogeyman of “false guilt,” going to great lengths to make sure that whatever guilt and responsibility are ascribed to them are precisely measured to the last ounce. This is us, Reformed Christians, who so love to repeat to the whole world what wretched sinners we are and how there is nothing good in us, but, boy, let someone tell us we have certain real guilt and responsibility to deal with, we suddenly forget our pious postures and defend our innocence like it’s our life.

I am not saying this to shame Reformed Christians, nor to shame anyone in particular. But I am personally ashamed. We should all be ashamed that those who call on the name of the Lord have left the pagans have a better understanding of Biblical ethics and especially the ethics of intercession, which is central to the Gospel. We should be all ashamed that after 2,000 years of church councils and synods, theological treatises, Biblical commentaries, creeds and confessions, reformations and revivals, seminaries and gospel crusades, Jesus’s words in Luke 16:8 still hold true: “The children of this world are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light.” We are still the stupid ones; we have still not understood the most basic concepts of the very Gospel we are preaching, while the pagans to whom we are preaching it have understood them and practice them. (On a side note, that may be the reason why Hollywood is making movies with more Biblical worldview in them than most of the sermons we hear from our pulpits today. We are still the stupid ones.)

What is the Biblical view of acknowledging guilt and responsibility? What is the Biblical view of “false guilt”? Is the man of God supposed to fight for every ounce of guilt and responsibility, and precisely measure them to decide which one is his and which one is not? Is there any Biblical foundation for such aversion to being ascribed guilt or to being called for repentance for the corporate sins of a nation or another covenantal group? Is there any morality in giving absolution to men of power and influence and higher social status while throwing the blame on their inferiors or subordinates?

The answer to all these is, “No.” Not only doesn’t the Bible justify such behavior, it specifically declares that a truly spiritual man not only takes as his own the guilt of other people, but also that this is the very nature of redemption, intercession (which is the essence of priesthood), and, thus, of the very Gospel itself that we are preaching. If righteous men refuse to acknowledge other people’s guilt and responsibility as their own, the Kingdom of God can’t even grow. And, therefore, our aversion to guilt and incessant fear of the boogeyman of “false guilt” have played a major role in the loos of influence by the church. Let’s see the Biblical evidence.

In Exodus 32, Moses returned from the mountain with the tables of Lawand found his own brother Aaron leading Israel into adultery and idolatry. His initial reaction was holy anger. He broke the tables, then burned the golden calf, ground it to powder, put it in water and forced Israel to drink it. In all this, Moses was holy and righteous and just. He had just been before God, fasting for 40 days, full with the Holy Spirit. After he had dealt with the sin in the camp, he stood before God, and, what do you think, did he ascertain his personal righteousness and freedom of guilt before God? Exactly the opposite. He declared to God that God would either have to forgive their sin, or He would have to punish Moses with them: “But now, if You will, forgive their sin—and if not, please blot me out from Your book which You have written!” (Ex. 32:32). Can you imagine that? The man just showed the most righteous behavior one can show when confronted by public sin, shows himself not only perfectly innocent of the crime but also of any toleration of it, and the next thing he does is put h imself in the harm’s way for other people! Couldn’t he be like our modern Reformed elders, declaring to God, “Datnotmuhfault, I didndunuting!”? He could. But he was of a different spirit than our modern Reformed elders. Of the Holy Spirit, to be precise.

Should we look at Daniel’s example, in Daniel 9? Look at what Daniel says in verses 4-6:

I prayed to the LORDmy God and confessed and said, “Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances. Moreover, we have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers and all the people of the land.”

Daniel confessed that. Yes, Daniel. Yes, confessed. Yes, he spoke in first person, as if he was one of these people who had committed all these sins. But he wasn’t. Daniel wasn’t even born when all these sins were committed. Those were sins of previous generations, accumulated over the years by the people of Israel, resulting in the judgment of the captivity. As far as personal guilt was involved, Daniel wasn’t responsible. He didndunuting. And yet, he acknowledged as his own guilt that wasn’t his, because he was a covenant member of the same nation that committed those sins. Why? Because that’s the very nature of standing in the gap: you can’t stand in the gap, you can’t intercede for your nation unless you admit the sins of the nation as your own, and be ready and willing to take the responsibility for them.

Examples of such intercession are common in the Old Testament – actually, more common that most of us realize – but I won’t have all the time to mention them all. In fact, some of them are listed in that hall of fame in Hebrews 11. what is more important, however, is that we have two very important New Testament examples; and these examples should be sufficient for us to know what the Biblical ethics concerning guilt and responsibility is.

The first example is Paul. Not that Paul was unique: all the apostles, in one way or another, put their lives on the line and sufefred punishments for someone else: for Christ. Peter, according to the church legend, found his death in exactly such a way: He was leaving Rome to flee the persecutions, when he saw a vision of Christ going in the opposute direction, towards Rome. Puzzled, Peter asked, “Quo vadis, Domine? Where are you going, Lord?” Jesus replied, “To Rome, to die with my children whom you have left there.” Ashamed, Peter returned to the city and assumed his place as the chief victim, matching his position of the chief of the apostles, being hanged upside down. While we can’t know if the legend is true, we do see the mentality of the early church: that the greater a man is in terms of his influence and authority and privilege (having been with Jesus), the more he should be willing to willngly accept guilt and responsibility and even suffer for them. Even where he has the chance of avoiding the suffering; let alone where there is no suffering involved.

But Paul’s example is much more important to us given that we have it from Paul’s personal testimony, recorded in the Bible. In Romans 9:3 Paul pronounces one of the most amazing statements in the Bible, one that still makes me, having studied that statement and the context in detail, to shake my head in disbelief: did Paul really say that? His words are, “For I wish that I myself were accursed,separatedfrom Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” So incredible is this statement that Paul finds it necessary to start the passage with the words, “I speak the truth, I am not lying,” as if to swear to those who won’t believe him. And they have a good reason not to believe him. Being willing to be persecuted and killed by the enemies; that’s something big. But to be willing to even be separated from Christ and accursed, to save his enemies – now this is what is called intercession of the highest order. Paul was highly privileged: he was saved in the most miraculous and spectacular manner the Bible describes; and then he was given the most honorable position in the church, to be her most gifted theologian and her most prolific missionary, to yield power and influence even Peter didn’t yield, and to have the Holy Spirit in such a gigantic measure as to be caught up to the third heaven and shown things no living man had seen. And yet, Paul was willing to trade all this privilege, and more than that, he was willing to trade his salvation, accepting eternal damnation for his people, if only they could be saved.

But when talking about privilege, Paul’s privilege was nothing compared to the top privileged person in the Bible, the giant of all privileges, Jesus Christ. Who can be more privileged than Him? Born of God, not of a mortal, fallen man. Crowned with glory and power from before the world was. The Arch-Angel of God’s revelation under the Old Covenant. The Imprint (literally, the Character, in Heb. 1:3) of God’s being. One with the Father, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords. The Beginning and the End. The metaphysical principle of cohesion of all things in the universe, from the smallest atom to the galaxies (Col. 1:17).

Amd in addition to it, He had no personal guilt of His own. It was by privilege: He was born outside the line of Adam. And it was also by merit: He was tempted and passed the temptation without succumbing to it. Above all power by privilege; above all accusation and guilt and liability by both privilege and merit. And what did He do with that absolutely privileged position?

He took on Himself all the guilt of the world. And that taking on of all the guilt of the world became the absolute foundation for the glorious Gospel we today preach. Or pretend to preach, while acting contrary to it. Jesus traded all His privilege,all His merit, for guilt and liability. And punishment. Paul’s desire to be separated from Christ was real, but still only conjectural: He would never be separated from Christ just on the account of that desire. Christ willing took to be separated from God in order to save the world, and He got exactly that. False guilt? He took it all. False accusations? He took them all. False liability? He took it all. An unjust sentence, and torture, and no due process? He suffered them all.

And it was this trading of privilege and merit for false guilt that won Him the victory. Because measuring our guilt down to the ounce never wins victories. Which is patrly why the American church has been so powerless in the last century. Or, as a Gypsy pastor in Bulgaria preached to his congregation several years ago, “You wanna imitate Christ? Take all the guilt and responsibility for the ills of our community. Nail the guilt to the cross; and take the responsibility to the streets, and work as if you are repaying a debt.” And he was simply a Gypsy pastor of no seminary education, and no Reformed legacy from previous generations. And he knew better than our Reformed leaders.

To summarize, our obsession today with not accepting false guilt is not a Biblical attitude. If anything, the very Gospel of Christ starts with the Author of our salvation accepting on Himself all the false guilt in the world. If we are to imitate Him, we should do the same. Unlike Him, we won’t have to die for it, neither will we have to be separated from god for it; thus, there is no reason to kick so ferociously against it. We will only be required to pay for it, in this life, with hard work, to restore and reconstruct the world on Biblical foundation. It may not have been our fault, but it wasn’t Jesus’s fault either. When it comes to the evils of our day, we should accept them as our responsibility. And also the evils of generations past, including slavery. Yes, it is our guilt. And it is our responsibility to restore and reconstruct; including finding a way to pay those reparations in one way or another. Until we learn to not shy from guilt, until we learn to stand in the gap and use our privilege as Christians and Americans to bring redemption, we won’t see any victory.

The book I will assign for reading this week is Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, by John Murray. Keep in mind as you are reading: the book is not comprehensive for what we just talked about. But it is a tremendous start into what our psychology should be, when we set out to imitate Christ. And so far we have been disastrously inept in this regard. It is time to overcome the children of this age in terms of wisdom and judgment.

And in your prayers and your giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. As much as we as Reformed Christians are such moral failures today, the future of mankind is inevitably Christian, and our kids will surpass us in knowledge and wisdom and judgment. Help us leave the right books for them when they grow up. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, pray, and donate. And God may God bless y’all.

Welcome to Episode 69 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will delve into the problem of strategy, strategic thinking, long-term orientation, and postmillennial optimism.

That’s right, these are the things we will be talking about. You may be wondering if this is the right episodefor the title, or the right title for the episode,but it is. We will be talking about sodomite “marriage,” or, rather, about the history of sodomite “marriage,” but we will be looking at it from a strategic perspective, one that projects our world a few decades ahead, and works to establish what our focus needs to be today in order to prepare for the future and its challenges. In one of his audio tape series of back in the 1980s, Dennis Peacocke said that “the future belongs to those who have prepared themselves for it.” Given that our cultural present in the US doesn’t belong to the American church but rather to her enemies, we can rightly assume that the church in decades past didn’t care to prepare herself for the future. Or, that her leaders and ministers didn’t care to prepare her for the future. You know, Billy Graham passed away a few weeks ago, and while reading different articles – some of them eulogies and some criticisms – I couldn’t help but think, “If I ever cared about the reputation I leave, the last thing I want to be known for is being ‘America’s pastor’ duringthe decades of the most precipitous loss of Christian influence in America.” OK, OK, I am not trying to say that Billy Graham was deliberately guilty of destroying Christian influence in the culture; but the truth is, whatever he did or believed he was doing, he did not prepare the church for thefuture, which is our present, and thus our present doesn’t belong to the church. And Graham is not solitary responsible. Thousands of pastors in the last 100 years have done nothing to prepare the church for the future, ad as a result, when the future arrived, it was captured by the enemies of God. In fact, if anything, thousands of pastors have deliberately focused on short-term issues, and ignored the long-term issues of the future. There wasn’t even a self-conscious effort to discern what was short-term and what was long-term, what battles deservedmost of our time and effort and resources and what battles should be either left alone or only committed small time and effort. This lack of discernment – and even a refusal to seek discernment – has lead to grave consequences today.

So today I will tell you a story. A story from history. And you make your conclusions about the future.

A couple of years ago, in the middle of the public debate over the Supreme Court decision on the Obergefell v. Hodges, I heardVoddie Baucham sayin a lecture, or a sermon that for the first time, a government acknowledges marriages between people of the same sex.It wasn’t just Voddie, however.LaterI heard and read the same claimrepeated several times. I assume, the claim was made to create a dramatic effect on the hearers; to make them realize that this is a very special moment in history, and this moment justifies the sudden attention the preachers gave it. Now, there is much to be said about why the evangelical leaders of our day have to resort to such dramatic effects in order to shake their people out of their apathy; it is the fault of those same evangelical leaders who have preached apathy for decades. But this is an issue for another episode of Axe to the Root. As of now, I only want to focus on the claim that this is a unique moment in history in respect to sodomite “marriage.” And when we examine that claim, we will see that there are certain covenantal lessons for us in the history related to it.

There is only one problem with such a claim: it is false. In history, many cultures and governments approved of and sanctioned sodomite unions. Ancient Egypt, Assyria, many Native American cultures. In Greece, the city-state of Thebes even had its elite troops – the Secret Band of Thebes – staffed with sodomite couples of male lovers; the theory was that since sodomite male love is spiritually loftier than the love between a man and a woman, male lovers will fight much more ferociously to protect their lovers. The Fujian province of China was known for its ancient history of sodomite marriages. The Buddhist temples of Tibet, China, and Japan practiced pederasty (old men with young boys) as part of their normal everyday lifeall the way until WWII. (Ironically, it was the Chinese Communists, of all people, who put an end to the practice.) Sodomite practices and “marriages,” in any kind or form, have always existed in pagan societies. Yes, even in Islam. In fact, Islam changed its policies and laws on sodomy only under the influence of Victorian England. And even as late as the early 20thcentury, notable British sodomites like John Maynard Keynes would travel to Tunisia to find themselves young boys for sexual pleasures.

But there is more to the story. While we can expect that pagan societies, constantly being in war against God, would not only tolerate but also officially codify sodomy in their laws and customs, what is not known today is that Christian Europe also had widespread sodomy, and even sodomite marriages, for a while. And yes, church ministers presided over these marriages and officially registered them in their books. And fromthis lapse in the history of the church we today can learn a very serious covenantal lesson.

The Roman Empire in its last days before Constantine was given over to all kinds of immorality, and in fact, that immorality continued long after Constantine. The Eastern Empire became officially Christian under Theodosius I, but the Western Empire continued to be a mixture of paganism and Christianity. Ironically, it was the invading Germanic tribes who brought Christianity – or its heresy, Arianism – and with it, stricter morals. The old Roman aristocracy remainedpagan in its beliefs and ways, and kept the immorality of the past. And with it, kept its sodomy as part of its life.

The Western church, thus, started with the habit of overlooking that sin. In the first centuries after the fall of the Western Empire, there were almost no writings against sodomy. It was practiced for sure, and there were a few laws here and there against it, but in general, the society was tolerant of it. One reason could have been the fact that since sodomy is usually a sin related to wealth and free unproductive time, it was mostly the nobility and the monks that engaged in it. Being a sin of mostly the powerful of the day, therefore, not many theologians dared challenge the status quoagainst powerful men.

Apparently,therefore,during that period of time sodomites were rather tolerated. In the 8thcentury, Pope Gregory III only postulated one year penance for male sodomy and 5 months for female sodomy. The 8thcentury, of course, was still the so-called Dark Ages – not in the sense the secularists use the word, as in the ages of Christendom, but “dark” in the sense that the previously relatively secure and safe lands of the Roman Empire were still in turmoil after the fall of the Western Roman Empire two centuries earlier. Northern Africa and Spain were in the hands of the powerful Muslim dynasties of the Abbasids and the Ummayads. The Eastern Roman Empire was fighting for its life against the both the Caliphate in the east (Constantinople was besieged by the Arabs twice in 40 years) and the newly formed Bulgarian Empire in the north. Charlemagne hadn’t become a King of the Franks yet to unite the West, so the borders of Christendom were assaulted by Saxon, Norse, and Slavic barbarians, themselves pushed west by the tribes of the Eurasian steppes. In this situation, a sexual sin largely limited to a former ruling class that had become obsolete was not considered a priority. In the catalog of church penances, male sodomy was ranked together with other sexual practices that were not specifically banned by the Bible – within the family, of course –but were meant only for pleasure, not procreation.

The reign of Charlemagne brought to Western Europe the peace it had lacked for centuries; with peace came relative prosperity, and with prosperity, complacency and idleness returned, and with them, the sins that usually accompany complacency and idleness. Especially among a class of the population which by that time has received a number of privileges by Charlemagne and his heirs, and therefore had the luxury of indulging in those sins: the monks.

In 1051, the Benedictine monk Peter Damian wrote a long open letter to the then reigning pope, Leo IX; a letter that later was published ina book under the name of The Book of Gomorrah. The letter was a scathing attack uponthe clergy and the monks at the time, and it contained a long list of sexual sins and crimes that were rampant in the church. At the top of the list was sodomy and the related to it pederasty, that is, sexual abuse of underage boys. (The goal of sodomy – what today is called “homosexualism” – has always been pederasty, the abuse of underage boys.) Sodomy was rampant in the monasteries and among the clergy, said Damian, and he also spoke against the multiple practices of sexual abuse of boys given to the monasteries for education, or as orphans for care. The practice used to be accepted as normative in pagan Athens (Plato mentions it in his Dialogues), and it was banned by the early Christian emperors. But in the 11thcentury, the monasteries and the church schools had become a den of sodomitic iniquity, and children were the main victim of it. Against these did Peter Damian write, and requested that the Pope introduce new and harsher penalties, as well as demand the civil rulers legislate harsher civil penalties.

His letter earned him the hatred of many churchmen at the time. Remember, sodomy is usually a sin luxury and idleness, thus, it is mainly the social elites that indulge in it. Damian’s attack on sodomy stirred the hornet’s nest and he quickly earned a lot of enemies. Pope Leo IX first praised the book highly but then, after pressure from the powerful of the day,changed his mind and decided that Damian’s criticism was an exaggeration. The very fact that there was such a push back, however, was sufficient proof that Damian was not exaggerating; sodomy was really rampant in the church. Of this period we have the first recorded sodomite marriage officially done by a church priest: in 1061 two men, Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz were officially married by a priest in a small chapel in Galicia in Spain. Modern Roman Catholic commentators claim that the priest probably didn’t realize that he was marrying two men, but the names are very specifically male (Spanish names, unlike many modern English names, are very gender-specific). There is no way that the priest didn’t know what he was doing.

If the Renaissance was a period of great strides in fine arts, the pre-Renaissance centuries were a period of great development in poetry; one can remember that the Renaissance itself started with the poetry of two men, Dante Alighieri and Petrarch. Almost anyone literate enough to write was writing poems for different occasions, and whole epic stories were told in verse. (Think of the Norse sagas and edas, Beowulf, the whole chivalry epos, etc.) Those not literate enough to write poems just memorized them, and a favorite past time at social gatherings was reciting poems – a leftover from earlier times when tribal lore was transmitted to generations by reciting it at public gatherings. Of course, in a time when only the elite could have the luxury to learn to read and write, it was mainly the elite – the nobility and the clergy – who wrote poems. And guess what: since sodomy is mainly a sin of idleness, of those in the elite who had enough time on their hands and were bored of just standard everyday life, the centuries before the Renaissance saw an abundant flow of sodomite poetry, and – mark this – it was written mainly by priests and monks. A number of bishops between the 9thand the 11thcentury left poems that were obviously sodomite. Poetry, of course, always allows for an abundant use of similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech, and in poetry, the author has the liberty of hiding in plain sight his real motives and purposes. But even allowing for the most favorable interpretations, many of these poems were unmistakably sodomite and expressed sodomite lust. In one example, in the 9thcentury, a priest from Verona in Italy wrote a poem about a boy who was stolen away by his rival with words that were obviously an imitation of love poems written to women at the time:

One of these stones is that boy who disdainfully

Scorns the entreaties I utter, ah, painfully!

Joy that was mine is my rival’s tomorrow,

While I for my fawn like a stricken deer sorrow!

In the late 11thand early 12thcentury Baldric, first an abbot of the monastic commune at Bourgeuil for 27 years and then bishop of Dol in Brittany for another 23 years, was known for writing love poems. Late in his life he admitted, again, in a poem, that among the addressees of his poems he had males as well as females:

I wrote to maids, and wrote to lads no less.

Some things I wrote, ’tis true, which treat of love;

And songs of mine have pleased both he’s and she’s.

The number of such poems during that period is surprisingly large, and may be not so surprisingly, given that during that period, the church’s penalties on sodomy were relatively light. The civil government’s penalties on sodomy were much harsher, but only on the books. Most of the sodomites were members of the government elite anyway, so they could get a pass. And, judging from the extant poetry, sodomy was widespread among the clergy, and the clergy, under the legal structure of the day, was exempt from civil sanctions, except where there was a violation of the royal law. And the clergy was surprisingly bold in their depictions of sodomy. The two poems I quoted above were of the mildest and most restrained sort. Many other were unashamed expressions of burning lust, containing depictions of physical contact and even metaphorized verbal pictures of sexual touching. Yes, that was among churchmen in the 9ththrough the 12thcentury.

Peter Damian was right after all, and his letter to Pope Leo IX was not an exaggeration, after all.

A generation after Damian’s letter, the First Crusade was called, and the era of the Crusades started, to last for about two centuries. (Perhaps even three and a half, if one counts the lesser campaigns against the Turks which continued until the fall of Constantinople in the mid-15thcentury.) Until that time, Christendom had not seen warfare over such long distances. Within the small confines of Europe, wars were fought over short distances, and the armies’ trains usually included either the families of the knights (if they were wealthy enough to afford it) or prostitutes who took care of, and advantage of, the sexual needs of the soldiers. From this perspective, the Crusades were a different game. First, the distance was too far from home for either families or prostitutes to be willing to join the journey; besides, the logistics of caring for or carrying additional numbers of people over such long were complex for that day and age. And, second, the very nature of the Crusades as “holy wars” precluded allowing prostitutes with the armies, or even families. (Even sex within the family was considered “impure” when a knight was on a holy mission.) The military – especially where there was no strict moral code enforced – has always produced temptations for sodomite acts, and the Crusaders’ armies were not an exception. The tradition of homosexual poetry continued during that period, and in fact, the Crusades only gave it a new impetus. If anything, the Crusades would be expected to tacitly protect sodomy. The Crusaders were all knights, members of the nobility, and it is among the nobility that sodomy was spread in the previous centuries.In addition, the Crusaders – as participants in an undertaking by the Church – were protected from civil penalties; that is, only church penance was imposed if caught in the act, if they were ever even brought to trial.This is not to say that all Crusaders were sodomites; but certainly sodomites were able to find a safe haven in the Crusades, and especially in the religious orders of monks-warriors that were formed during that time. (Remember, it was monks and bishops who wrote sodomite poetry during that period.) They also fought and established their kingdoms in lands previously held by Muslims. There was cultural exchange between the Crusaders and their enemies, and, guess what, contrary to what many people imagine today, Islam is actually quite friendly towards sodomy, and sodomy among soldiers was rampant in the Muslim armies at the time.

It is commonly accepted today that the accusations of sodomy against the Knights Templar in the 14thcentury were all fabricated. The truth is, however, there was and still is abundant evidence that at least some of these accusations were true – although, admittedly, the main target of their accuserswas not the Knights’ morality but the wealth of their order.It was during that era when sodomite art started growing in Europe. Most of that art appeared disguised under religious themes, and it was mostly as illustrations to books or even Biblical texts. Some of it is quite disturbing: in one illustration, the three wise kings of Matthew chapter 2 were depicted lying in the same bed, under the same blanket, naked, and two of them are in a position of an unmistakably sexual nature. In another such illustration, the Garden of Eden is depicted with two couples who passionately hug and kiss each other – except that each couple is of the same sex – two men and then two women. Etc., etc., no need to continue with these descriptions. As much as we love to point to the Crusades as a time of great courage and victories for the Christian faith, the reality is, the Crusades were at best a mixed blessing; and they brought back to Europe just as much corruption and apostasy as the faith and courage they took away from it. And while in some respects the faith and the knowledge of some grew and were strengthened, sin – and especially sexual immorality – grew even more in Europe before the Renaissance. We like to imagine that Christendom was all good and pure before the Renaissance, and that it was the Renaissance that made it all bad and restored paganism. The historical truth is a bit different: European Christendom was already given overto immorality even before the Renaissance. In fact, there are legitimate reasons to say that the Renaissance was a step upward in terms of moral improvement. But that for another episode. Let’s stick to the sodomy issue.

The era when it all came to fruition was the 14thcentury. Before we examine sodomy during that century, we need to look at the historical circumstances.The 14thcentury was rightly called by many modern historians the Calamitous Century. The first 15 years of the century saw a rapid drop of temperatures across the globe (due, probably, to volcanic activity). In Central Asia, winters became so bitter cold that the Mongol Empire created by Ghengis Khan collapsed. In Europe, the summers quit being dependable for food production, which culminated in the three “years without summers,” 1315-1317, with bitter cold winters and constantly rainy summers. The famine of these three years decimated the population of Europe which hadn’t known a shortage of food for several centuries. Just 20 years later, with their populations barely recovered from the famine, and in the conditions of much colder and more hostile climate, the dynasties of the Plantagenets of Englandandthe Valois of France started a war which would last for another 116 years (the Hundred-Years’ War), leading to even worse loss of productivity and life. Ten years after the start of the war, in 1347, the Bubonic Plague hit Europe through Venice. Europe had seen epidemics before but nothing that destructive. Within just a couple of years, between one-third and half of the population of Europe was exterminated. In some places, local feudal lordswere left without serfs; they all died. Christendom received such a devastating blow that had it been attacked by even a small force, it would have been conquered. And in fact, such small force did appear. In 1362, a small army under the leadership Lala Shahin Pasha, subject of Murad I, the grandson of Osman I, the founder of a small Turkish principality in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles from Asiadeep into Byzantine territoryand captured the highly strategic but weakly defended city of Adrianopolis. Few people – even on the Balkans, where the local nominally Christian states, Bulgaria, Serbia, Walachia, Hungary, and a number of smaller principalities were busy fighting each other – paid attention to this bold move. Within the next 30 years, Murad I and his son Bayezid I conquered the whole Balkan peninsula and established positions to both conquer Constantinople andcreate a springboard for invasion into the very heart of Europe. The European powers realized the threat and assembled a significant army of the cream of their nobility for yet another crusade. That army – between 16 and 20,000 knights – was defeated so badly at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 thatonly 300 escaped; the reason for the defeat being that European knights were so undisciplined and so obsessed with personal glory that they could even come together with a common tactical plan for battle, but most just rushed to the enemy and go slaughtered. Economically, politically, militarily, even socially, Europe was as good as gone by the end of the 14thcentury.

One would expect that in the midst of all these calamities a Christian culture would develop at least the suspicion that all these may be God’s judgment on it for sins that shouldn’t even be present in it, let alone be rampant, let alone be almost the norm among the ruling classes. That’s the purpose of God’s judgment, after all, to inspire a return to the faith, and a return to the Biblical standards for justice and righteousness. But if anything, the 14thcentury saw only more apostasy. In the midst of constant wars, epidemics, and famine, the value of human life cheapened and death became prevalent. The hearts of men, instead of turning to God, hardened. And that was not only among the elite.Sexual immorality became rampant evenamong the lower classes of the society. Before the 14thcentury, especially after the return of so many fighting men from the Crusades, it was common for the lower aristocracy, not having a means to make a living, and not willing to work for a living, to form gangs and terrorize whole areas either as marauders or as mercenaries for local rulers. The height of such activity was the 14thcentury. If you have read Arthur Conan Doyle’s poem, “The Song of the Bow” (“What of the bow? / The bow was made in England: / Of true wood, of yew-wood, / The wood of English bows; / So men who are free / Love the old yew-tree / And the land where the yew-tree grows.), was inspired by one such English gang in Italy, led by the English mercenary John Hawkwood. And there were hundreds like Hawkwood terrorizing Europe.

But in the middle of the 14thcentury, right after the worst devastation of both the Black Death and the greatest battles of the Hundred-Years’ War, local peasant communities alsostarted organizing such gangs and raiding nearby cities. Europe became a nightmare of violence and injustice. Some of those gangs eventually grew strong enough to stage peasant revolts in France, Germany, Flanders, England. The dissolution of civil power removed the externalrestraints, and without restraints, the European society was in a constant collapse. The reason for it, of course, was the church. In the previous several centuries, the church had adopted for its social doctrine feudalism, the concept that the only bonds that provide cohesion in the society were the bonds of power and submission to higher powers. (Not self-government under God, as in the Law of God.) When the calamities of the century weakened the bonds of power and submission, men had no other principle of cohesion to fall back on; and chaos ensued. A parallel can be made to the modern American evangelical church which has elevated submission to powers to the level of a fundamental tenet of the faith, at the expense of self-government; we should expect that if and when another calamity weakens the civil powers (like the inability of the government to pay on its debt), that will lead to similar problems. But that’s an issue for a different episode.

Together with all the other dissolution of morals, the dissolution of sexual morals reached its culmination in the 14thcentury. Pre-marital sex was officially disapproved of by the church, but in real life, its stigma was removed. Young men at the time freely looked for available women to satisfy their lust. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron was published just a couple of years after the Black Death, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was written in the last decade of that century, after another epidemics of smaller proportions. Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s treatment of extra-marital sex as a solution to psychological or health problems was not unique; it was the common “wisdom” of that age. Their description of sex as a tool of power of women over men – and sometimes vice-verse – was also in line with the spirit of that age. The Romance of the Rose, a poem of 22,000 lines written by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, became a true bestseller among the aristocracy. The poem was a detailed description of the art of sensual and sexual seduction, and became like a liturgy of pornography to the courtier classes.Falling in love with a married woman and having fantasies about her was considered the highest expression of pure love for a knight. Female clothing – both in court and on the street – became deliberately suggestive and revealing, exposing more and more flesh which in earlier centuries was considered out of bounds. In the cities and in the countryside, the common folk organized parades and festivals similar to the ancient Saturnalia, where men and women paraded and danced naked in public, and indulged in public sexual acts. Just like in ancient Rome and Greece, the children were not spared; if anything, girls and boys as young as 12 were considered sexually active and were involved in such debauchery.

In this setting, sodomy reached its culmination and flourished like never before. By that time, some of the theologians of the Western Church had developed the theory that sodomy was mainly sin against natural law – and that is, because is didn’t lead to procreation. Thomas Aquinas was responsible for taking that theory to its logical end. And while Aquinas also said that sodomy was second in gravity only to murder, the result of that theory was to diminish the gravity of sodomy as sin; it was no graver sin than adultery, or fornication, or even than sexual relations within the family, between a man and his wife, simply for pleasure, not for procreation. (Yes, that was considered sin.) But in a society where all such acts were widespread because of the common dissolution of morals, sodomy was not considered anything too offensive. There were, of course, civil penalties against sodomy, but since sodomy was mainly a sin of the members of the feudal elite or of the military and monastic castes, those penalties were seldom applied. The church was rather silent . . . or, as a matter of fact, as we will see, it even joined the other side for a while.

In many of the cities of Italy, there were special sections of town where the male prostitutes lived. In monasteries, sodomy had always existed even before the 14thcentury, but in the 14thcentury, it was now even openly celebrated in art. Some monasteries’ wall paintings of the time exhibit men hugging each other in poses that can’t be anything else but sexual; and the practice of monks raping boys sent to them for education seems to have continued throughout the century.

And in Italy, church priests started performing sodomite marriages. A number of such marriages were recorded in several cities in North Italy; there may have been even more of which we don’t know due to lost records. Again, such marriages were mainly limited to the political elite, to those who had immunity to the otherwise strict judicial laws against sodomy. Of what we know, most such marriages were performed in small chapels, usually not in big ceremonies. By the end of the 14thcentury, some feudal courts had official same-sex couples. And while there were voices within the institutional church against perversion and debauchery, the majority went with it. In his Inferno, Dante Alighieri mentioned specific names of well-known sodomites in high government positions, one of them Guido Guerra, a man of influence and power, a military leader, and a confidant of Pope Innocent IV. Sodomy, apparently, was not even concealed, if the sodomites were so well-known; and even the popes had no problem befriending and confiding in sodomites.

In terms of morality, therefore, the 14thcentury was the lowest point in the history of Christendom. No matter what area of life one would want to look at, family, sexuality, war, economics, social relations, foreign policy, art and literature, every area of life was soaked in wickedness and injustice. Rampant sodomy was only a natural consequence of the rampant total wickedness in the culture. What made it even worse than other cultures, however, was that the church said and did next to nothing against it. In most instances of immorality, church ministers joined the powerful of the day (or themselves were the powerful of the day), and indulged in that immorality themselves.

And then it suddenly ended, within a little over one generation.

Reading that part of history, I have always wondered about that abrupt change. The 14thcentury was, indeed, a dark age – not in the sense modern secularists propose it. In fact, if anything, they would have loved living in that century, with its dissolution of morals, its secularist character, and especially with the licentious liberty of its artists and poets, supported even by church ministers in high positions. The free fall of the society continued well into the mid-15thcentury – and with it, continued the judgment from God. There were no new moral or judicial reforms, and there were no leaders who would dare lead the society to correction. The only person who tried to reform something in the church or in the society based on the Law of God was the Czech reformer John Hus; but after he was executed, his followers either went into heretical extremes (including lawlessness and sexual immorality) or returned under the Roman church, for the lack of any vision of how the reforms should continue. The last crusade against the Turks, started by the Polish/Lithuanian king Wladislaw in 1443 ended in bitter defeat near Varna (today in Bulgaria; I used to live right where the battle was fought in 1444), and that for the same reasons as the defeat at Nicopolis 50 years earlier: his knights had no self-discipline, no self-control, and were driven by ambition for personal glory and honor rather than common military sense. Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453; in the same year, England and France finally ended the Hundred-Years’ War, not because they resolved their problems but because both kingdoms ran out of resources, including human resources. The Black Death returned several times after the great outbreak in 1347, in some regions. Even the universities started in the previous centuries were now closing for the lack of qualified professors; the plague had taken the lives of many of them. For all practical purposes, in 1453 Europe laid in ruins, politically, socially, economically, militarily, intellectually. And in the midst of all this, sexual immorality – including sodomy – reigned supreme everywhere, from the highest courts to the lowest villages of the land.

And then all suddenly changed. I have no idea where the change came from; there is no specific event or historical factor that can be declared the beginning of the change towards correction. After the 1450s, within a generation, Christendom suddenly developed the discipline, the desire for righteousness, the vision, and the impetus to break with the previous generations. In Portugal, Prince Henry the Navigator started laying the foundation for the Age of Exploration by developing a new kind of ship (the caravel) and training a generation of navigators like Antonio Noli, Nuno Tristao, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama and many others, who became role models for many European youths (including the Genovese Christopher Columbus). Both Spain and Portugal were able to train armies disciplined enough to defeat the Moors and rejoin the peninsula to Christendom; Columbus left for his first journey in the same year the last Muslim fortress in Spain, Granada, fell to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella. These new victories were the result of the development of better gunpowder and weapons, which took more disciplined armies than the knights of the previous era. In 1444, when Wladislaw was defeated at Varna, the technological levels of Islam and Christendom were the same. Just 50 years later, Christendom had superior ships and shipbuilding, and superior firepower on both sea and land. In 1439 Gutenberg developed the movable type, and within just 20 years, Europe produced more copies of different books that all of the previous centuries together. The universities were revived. A number of reformers appeared even before Luther, the greatest names among whom were Girolamo Savonarola in Italy and Desiderius Erasmus in Northern Europe. Europe, which had sunk to the bottom of the pit of iniquity, rose quickly to levels of individual and social morality that she never had before. Luther’s Reformation was not produced in a vacuum; it could only succeed because the righteousness of the society was pulling far ahead, while the morality of the institution of the church was lagging behind.

What about sodomy?

By the end of the 15thcentury, sodomy had almost disappeared from public life. As opposed to the abundant evidence of widespread sodomy in the previous century, the second half of the 15thcentury and the 16thcentury give very little evidence of it. Erasmus, who, in his satire,In Praise of Folly, wrote against the clergy of his time, only mentions it in passim. (Compare this to the literature of the previous ages.) Luther, when asked about his view on sodomy, declared that he would prefer to leave the subject untouched, his fellow Germans were so blissfully unlearned about this horrible vice that he didn’t want to give them a chance to get educated in perversion, even if through a sermon. Calvin, in the gigantic volumes of his sermons and commentaries, never tackles directly the issue of sodomy: apparently, neither France nor Switzerland in his time had any widespread sodomy. John Knox also didn’t elaborate on that sin in his letters or sermons; he must have not considered it an issue in Scotland or England. Compared to Europe of just a generation or two before, in the 1300s and the early 1400s, sodomy seemed to have disappeared in Europe. Only a few cases are known of that time, and certainly none of them brazenly public display of perversion by the elites.

What happened? To what can we ascribe such abrupt change? Certainly not to any church revival. There wasn’t any, in that period. There was no major drive towards reformation by any established church figure. The change in the society happened independently of the church; the seeds grew without any institutional help. How did that transformation happen? And what made sodomy disappear so abruptly within just a generation?

The answer can be found when we consider the nature of the sodomite culture, and the nature of the godly, family-based culture.

A sodomite culture is, by default and by its very definition, devoid of the ability to produce fruit. As long as that culture hasn’t developed to its practical maturity, it still has mixed practices: many of the early sodomites in Rome, and later in medieval Europe, had families and wives and children, while practicing their sodomy. The perversion, therefore, continued by example and imitation in the families and in the culture. But such mixture is not a matured sodomite culture. When a sodomite culture develops to its maturity, it completely rejects the concept of procreation and view of the future. (That’s why modern sodomites are the main supporters of the abortion industry.) To put it simply, a sodomite culture that has come to fruition has come to fruitlessness. It can’t develop anymore. It can’t procreate. It can’t produce offspring for the future. It can’t even think of the future. All it can do is destroy itself. It may bring some destruction on the culture around itself, but even there, a sodomite culture get so powerless the closer it gets to its fruition that even its attempts at destruction are powerless.

And eventually, it disintegrates of itself. Even where there is no organized resistance against it.

And it gets replaced with a culture of future-oriented families whose purpose is conquering the world. Even if that culture starts very small and very weak, and even if it looks like it won’t have any chance to survive against the odds.

And you all make the conclusions for yourself, in our culture today.

The book I will assign for reading this week is A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman. Tuchman is an outstanding historian, and an even more outstanding story-teller. Read the story of the 14thcentury in that book. And as you realize the moral and social chaos Europe was thrown in by the end of the 14thcentury, just keep in mind that just two generations after the end of the book, Europe was completely different. And let that govern your hope and strategies for the future.

And speaking of strategies of the future, remember in your prayer and giving Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. That’s right. No matter how the situation looks today, eventually, only the Christian civilization survives long term. And we are there for the long term. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, read what a mission is supposed to do to win long-term, pray, and donate. God bless you all.