Civil Commotion

Puh-leeze! This is so egregiously nonsensical that it is painful to read.

• The Founders were overwhelmingly Deists — not Christians.

• I have a copy of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion right next to my desk, and I find in the Preface, addressed to the King of France, these words:

  The characteristic of a true sovereign is, to acknowledge that, in the administration of his kingdom, he is a minister of God. He who does not make his reign subservient to the divine glory, acts the part not of a king, but a robber. He, moreover, deceives himself who anticipates long prosperity to any kingdom which is not ruled by the scepter of God, that is, by his divine word.

• John Calvin oversaw the execution, by burning at the stake, of more than thirty heretics.

We can safely believe, I think, that John Calvin would have put the Founders to the stake — and congratulated himself for his Righteousness.

But never mind. Follow the link, where you will read this:

The 350-year marriage of Protestant Christian theology and American popular culture is over. Christianity, it may be sadly said, is no longer the preeminent social influence in American life. We Christians who dared to presume that America was ever all and only ours are, apart from some God-ordained awakening, unlikely to “get our country back.” We will live and work henceforth, as do most other Christians around the world, amidst a public square hostile to our beliefs.

Even as I applaud and freely grant that the author is uncommonly honest for a Godly man, I deny without caveat or qualification that he has any right to consider himself an American. His words betray that he knows nothing about his country, and is hostile to its ideals.

Less dramatically but just as surely as their parent organization, enrollment in Southern Baptist seminaries shows a decline.

As a group, seminary enrollment as measured by FTE has declined 2.4% over the past three years. Gateway has declined the most, 16.4% but then they went through the relocation. Southeastern is close behind, declining 15.8%.

This makes sense. After all, overall acceptance of the Christian narrative is in decline. What is more, any ambitious young man with brains who sees that SBC churches are up, but overall membership is down, will figure-out pretty quickly that SBC churches are cannibalizing each other.

Better to go to Oral Roberts University and plunder Pentecostals after graduation.

This means, too, that fewer young women are being raised to be a preacher’s wife, meaning it’s going to be more difficult to raise their children to be preachers and preacher’s wives. Once established, the odds of reversing this trend are very small. This is, I am certain, the reason that such as Albert the Pious are such big champions of early childbirth, though the rest of the universe is trending toward older childbirth.

We are all acquainted with the famous 2^nd-paragraph of the Declaration of Independence; it contains, in just a couple of sentences, some of the most radical words ever put to paper. When written, they carried a death sentence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

As the years have gone by, as I’ve encountered arguments ad nauseum that the first sentence’s mention of a ‘Creator’ means we are a Christian Nation^*, I find that I am more moved by what follows:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

That passage, written by men familiar with Europe’s centuries of religious warfare and its appalling consequences, says plainly that this is a government of self-governing men free to live as “shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” I think that when we hear talk about a Christian Nation, we are hearing a perspective deeply hostile to the founding ideal of self-governance, and I think much of our contemporary turmoil has its locus in the refusal of a broad swath of American society to step-up to their country’s ideals.

We are not subjects bound to live and do as some distant king commands, whether that king is corporeal or cosmic. We are men, and we should live as our reason commands. That idea is the beating-heart of the Declaration of Independence, and the idea now threatened by Donald Trump (who is an authoritarian) and his evangelical supporters (who are children who want to be told what to do).

This would not be a bad time, then, to recall that Donald Trump lost the popular vote, and lost it decisively; just this past week, more than forty of the fifty states refused to indulge Trump’s absurd claim that voter fraud denied him a popular victory. America’s institutions are sound, and the American people are sound, and in the hard and ugly days that are coming we will be worthy of our heritage.

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^*   The Founders were Deists; they believed that the Creator created and then disengaged himself from human/earthly affairs. They explicitly rejected the idea of a personal god.

Honest to God: I just watched an interview with a moron who likened Trump’s tweets to Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats. We are s-o-o-o doomed.

E-mails link Michael Flynn and a Republican researcher to efforts to acquire the missing Clinton e-mails from Russian hackers.

In the midst of the 2016 campaign, a veteran GOP opposition researcher who said he had ties to ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn contacted hackers hoping to obtain emails that he believed Russian operatives had hacked from Hillary Clinton’s personal server, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Peter W. Smith reached out to computer security experts in the hopes of gaining access to the email trove and explicitly outlined his connection with Flynn in his recruiting emails, according to the report.

Flynn, y’all will recall, has demanded immunity in exchange for testimony before Congressional committees.

This story first appeared in the (paywalled) Wall Street Journal, an editorially conservative news outlet owned by Trump-buddy Rupert Murdoch; I think it has to be taken seriously.