Vileness
“The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.”
— Psalm 12:8
Overcome Evil with Good
“The Son of the Highest, the great self-sacrificing Non-Resistant, is our prophet, priest, and king. Though the maddened inhabitants of the earth have so long turned a deaf ear to his voice, he shall yet be heard. He declares that good is the only antagonist of evil which can conquer the deadly foe. Therefore he enjoins on his disciples the duty of resisting evil only with good.”
— Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance
Anno Domini 4
Beware of Men
Beware of Men
Beware of men in suits, my son;
Trust not thyself to a woman in heels:
Whose hope is in the gleaming, glittering hoard;
Whose souls were long since traded on exchange,
Bought and sold
For silver and gold.
Follow them not down plushy corridors,
Through halls of vain regard and empty praise,
Up glassed and brassy steps to penthouse peaks,
Lush with cool-roof chambers,
Void of cheer,
Smooth and sleek with stain of dark veneer.
Beware of him whose name is on the door,
Keep watch on her who sits enthroned within,
Whose tongues like cooing birds behind their hands
Sift lies through smiles
And whispering wiles
And falter not while hope of conquest stands.
Beware! Their dewlapped hearts are far from thee,
Enwrapped in bills and bonds and shares and notes,
Blanketed and muffled to the ears
Against thy sad and solitary cry.
Not fallen earth
Nor barren birth
Can move them to the brink of bitter tears.
Be not deceived nor follow in their way;
Forgo their cocktails, shun their happy hours.
No longer do they mind the soul’s bright spring:
They weep not with the dew
Nor shiver with the rain
Nor tremble with the leaf nor feel the pain.
Forsake the stocking sheer, the silken tie;
Return to the soil and taste the tang of earth.
Put hand to plough, face front and trace thy furrow,
Reclaim the dark and fecund fertile land.
Plant thy seed
Against thy need
And look not back where whitening pillars stand.
The Establishment
“The notion that this world, and the powers of it, are in the grip of evil, is too well established in Christian teaching to be lightly disregarded …
“By ‘the world’ I mean what the Church has always meant by ‘the world’ — and this surely includes the official and respectable earthly set-up, the thing ruled over by the Powers-that-be; indeed (there is no escaping the word) what we now call ‘the Establishment.’ This needs to be said, for we have now sufficiently secularized our minds to be in the habit of viewing the social and political set-up in which we are involved as something wholly, or largely, good in the eyes of God …
“… The Church can never truly ally itself either with our materialistic Conservatism or our materialistic Socialism. For the Church is up against the Establishment. It always was.”
— Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
Anno Domini 3
Opinion
“Public opinion surveys always reveal that people have opinions even on the most complicated questions, except for a small minority (usually the most informed and those who have reflected most). The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinions: this gives them the feeling of participation.”
— Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
Anno Domini 2
The Problem of Loyalty
“It might be argued that the problem of loyalty is the key problem of our age …
“Loyalty may be said to be evil in the sense that if any action is defended on the grounds of loyalty alone, it is defended on no rational grounds at all. ‘I do this out of loyalty to my party’ is irrational and amoral unless it is consequent upon, ‘My party is operating wholly and in every particular for the benefit of the human race.’ ‘I do this out of loyalty to my leader’ is irrational and amoral unless it is consequent upon, ‘My leader’s character, or purpose, or policy is such that it ought to be supported.’ Loyalty in itself is not a moral basis for action.”
— Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
Anno Domini 1
Current Events
“Neither past events nor great metaphysical problems challenge the average individual, the ordinary man of our times. He is not sensitive to what is tragic in life; he is not anguished by a question that God might put to him; he does not feel challenged except by current events, political or economic …
“A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along by the current, and can at no time take respite to judge and appreciate; he cannot stop to reflect.”
— Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
Don’t Get Fooled Again
“Will you walk into my parlor?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“‘Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.
The Way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many pretty things to show when you are there.”
— “The Spider and the Fly,” Mary Howitt, 1829
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Very few people on either side of the debate seem to understand what “separation of church and state” is really all about. The original intent was to protect poor Pilgrims against the corrupting influence of entanglement with the power establishment – not the other way around.
Ever since the Emperor Constantine conquered his rival Maxentius “by the sign of the cross” at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (312), most of Christendom has assumed that it is not only possible but even proper and necessary to maintain a solid connection between the government and the kingdom of God. The Radical Reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries – the so-called “Anabaptist” followers of Conrad Grebel, Menno Simons, and Jacob Amman – disagreed. They were convinced that the gospel had been sullied and the church corrupted by this unholy alliance. As a result, they adopted a principled and conscientious stance apart from the state. Many paid for it with their lives. It is primarily to them that we owe our modern concept of “separation.”
Fast forward to the present. On January 20, 2017, on the occasion of the inauguration of the forty-fifth President of the United States, Franklin Graham stood up at the podium and praised the new American Head of State in the following words: “Mr. President, in the Bible rain is a sign of God’s blessing. And it started to rain, Mr. President, when you came to the platform.”
The tragic irony of this spectacle is not lost upon some of us who remember the pilgrimage of Graham’s father, the Reverend Billy Graham. During the early days of his ministry Billy maintained personal ties with many governmental and political figures. It was his habit to invite presidents and governors to share the platform with him at his evangelistic crusades. In the late 1960s he kept up a fairly close relationship with President Richard Nixon. All this came back to bite him in a big way after Watergate.
In 2011, at age ninety-two, Billy Graham was asked if he had any regrets over his long career. His response? “I would have steered clear of politics.”[i] This wasn’t a new idea for him at the time. As a matter of fact, it reflected a conviction that had taken hold of him as early as 1979 when, in an interview granted to Sojourners magazine, he said:
I have gone back to the Bible to restudy what it says about the responsibilities we have as peacemakers. I have seen that we must seek the good of the whole human race, and not just the good of any one nation or race.
There have been times in the past when I have, I suppose, confused the kingdom of God with the American way of life. Now I am grateful for the heritage of our country, and I am thankful for many of its institutions and ideals, in spite of its many faults. But the kingdom of God is not the same as America, and our nation is subject to the judgment of God just as much as any other nation.[ii]
The words of the elder Graham ought to give us pause – especially at a moment when his son appears to be granting unqualified support to a government leader whose mantra is, “From now on it’s going to be America first!”
“Franklin Graham,” says Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “seems determined to repeat his father’s mistakes.”[iii] Perhaps so, but the rest of us don’t have to follow in his footsteps. Far better to embrace his father’s change of heart. Like Billy, we’ve all been tricked and trapped and co-opted by the political establishment too many times in the past. Let’s pray we don’t get fooled again.
_________________________________________________________________
[i] “Evangelist Billy Graham Says He Now Regrets Involvement in Politics,” Americans United for Separation of Church and State, March 2011.
[ii] “A Change of Heart: Billy Graham on the Arms Race,” Sojourners magazine, August 1979.
[iii] See footnote 1.
Team Spirit
“It is needless to speak of the totalitarian frame of mind for which the exercise of sports paves the way. We constantly hear that the vital thing is ‘team spirit,’ and so on. It is worth noting that technicized sport was first developed in the United States, the most conformist of all countries, and that it was then developed as a matter of course by the dictatorships, Fascist, Nazi, and Communist, to the point that it became an indispensable constituent element of totalitarian regimes.
“Sport is an essential factor in the creation of the mass man. “
— Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.
“Alternative Facts”
“The ideal subject for totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism