This is - what? - the umpteenth Precipice post bearing this title. It seems to have become a series.
The first one or two had to do with my position as a - oh, sheesh, I’m tired of this term, but it’s such widely recognized shorthand that I might as well go with it - Never Trumper. When I started Precipice in 2019, the Very Stable Genius was still president, and his cult was full-throatedly crowing about his ostensible achievements.
The broad-broad brush enumeration of our divisions is hopelessly outdated. It’s no longer just about supposedly privileged demographics keeping all others under its thumb. It’s not about fat cats versus the poor or “working people.” It’s not about men and women, or racial dynamics, or heterosexuals and people with unorthodox sex lives.
On the left side of each of these dichotomies alone, fissures abound. The “fat cat” class is made up of billionaires who advocate for confiscatory taxation rates and corporate executives who are willing to put a damper on their firms’ profitability in order to implement “sustainability” measures. Women may have organized the pussy-hat march, but the March for Life, now in its 47th year, is principally organized and attended by women. There’s palpable lesbian resentment against what transgenderism has done to the cause of mainstreaming homosexuality - not only for the lecherous males who can infiltrate women’s locker rooms, but for the more basic blurring of gender lines in the name of “fluidity” and “questioning.” Regarding racial dynamics, it’s telling that the coming split within the United Methodist Church - over homosexuality - puts African bishops and congregants on the side of traditionalist American Methodists. The Coalition of African American Pastors has been at the front of the defense of Biblical understanding of human sexuality since the dustup surrounding state legislatures’ enacting of religious freedom laws in the decade just concluded.
Those pastors stand on narrow ground indeed, as all Christians do. The Church has picked a dandy time to fracture, given the now-thoroughly-secularized culture’s determination to marginalize it. I put it this way at a LITD post about the UMC split:
This development joins other fissures within twenty-first century American Christianity - the Trumpist vs. non-Trumpist split within evangelicalism, the struggle of the Catholic Church to surmount the sex-abuse scandal - at a time when the overall faith is in a particularly vulnerable position. Our society becomes less Christian by the day.
And those other rifts remain raw. In particular, the dustup engendered by the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal continues to reverberate. The argument that Trump-supporting evangelicals are fully aware of his flaws and pray for his spiritual maturation as well as applaud for his laudable policy moves is superficially compelling, but its plausibility withers in the face of the roaring indulgence the Very Stable Genius got at his rally at King Jesus Ministry in Miami of one of his most egregious character flaws: his establishing of himself as a kind of savior:
During Trump’s speech at El Rey Jesus, he said he’s been the most supportive president for Christians.
Christians “have never had a greater champion — not even close — than you have in the White House right now. Look at the record,” he said. “We’ve done things that nobody thought was possible. We’re not only defending our constitutional rights, we’re also defending religion itself, which is under siege.”
He said his administration has stood up to the pro-abortion lobby, defended the free speech rights of Christians on college campuses and promoted prayer in schools. He also claimed he “got rid” of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates, to support the religious community.
Nice stuff, Mr. President, but what about you? The closest you came to saying anything about the real practice of faith at that rally was asserting that Americans worship God, not government. Beyond that, there’s nothing in your remarks that indicates that you have moved beyond your 2015 “I’m-not-sure-I’ve-ever-asked-for-God’s-forgiveness” observation. It looks like you still view everything through a transactional lens. It looks like your real message to that Miami crowd was “Never mind what’s going on in my heart and soul. Look what I’ve done for you on the policy level. I fight the worldly forces besieging you people. Now, turn out in November and vote for me.”
And the crowd eats it up.
That’s desperation, plain and simple. It’s opting to cast one’s lot with an incoherent charlatan who champions your cause even though his motivation is self-glorification, just because he can give you a little more breathing room in this temporal realm. That suffices in the quest for a leader to a lot of Christians these days.
If one turns one’s gaze from this spectacle and looks leftward, the notion of absolute truth gets downright scuttled, the process being couched in gauzy nods to “mystery” (juxtaposed against “absolute certainty”) and distinctions between “received interpretations of Scripture” and its “overarching narrative,” and odd assertions that Christians are tempted to “worship” the Bible rather than Jesus Christ. Um, what we know of Jesus Christ comes from the Bible. It’s all a sneaky way of insinuating relativism into the situation. It’s a way of saying that the Bible is a nice overall road map, but that its authority is tempered by our immediate sense of what appears fair and compassionate. And this argument comes from a Baptist publication.
What one sees on the left and right have a relationship of mutual reinforcement. Those on the left make “healing our divisions” the overarching aim, at the expense of the difficult aspects of sound doctrine, and those on the right cling to a supposed champion because they feel surrounded by apostates of all stripes.
Then came 2021, which was ushered in by one of the most shameful and peril-fraught days in American history. The fallout from the storming of the Capitol was full of dismaying vignettes: Mike Pence beginning his remarks on the Columbus, Indiana Municipal Airport tarmac upon his arrival home after Biden’s inauguration on the afternoon of January 20 by thanking Trump for four years of service to the nation, Kevin McCarthy, who, from the House floor while the insurrection was taking place on January 9, screamed “Do you know who the fuck you’re talking to?” to Trump on the telephone, only to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago mere weeks later, and Mitch McConnell, who, on the Senate floor, squarely placed the culpability for January 6 on Trump, only to say later that, should Trump be the 2024 nominee, he’d vote for him.
At some point during this period I became aware of Principles First. My enthusiasm for the project was immense. The Pillars page on the organization’s website was right up my alley: Burke, Montesquieu, Locke, Adam Smith, Blackstone. Can’t go wrong with those guys. The point was explicitly to shore up a conservatism that had serious roots as opposed to the nationalist-populist essence of Trumpism.
I began connecting with others getting involved on Twitter, which led to participating in online gatherings. My disappointment was great when, for health reasons, I couldn’t attend the in-person summit in Washington earlier this year. That event garnered some national media attention, and no less a personage than Liz Cheney sent her greetings via a video message.
But now a bit more than half of 2022 has transpired, and further developments have revealed just how conservative Principles First is - and is not. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, was based the conclusion that no right to abortion can be found in the Consitution. In his opinion, Justice Thomas said that, given the proper case to come before the Court, Obergefell v Hodges could similarly be reconsidered. To head such a possibility off at the pass, the House has passed a law codifying gay marriage in all fifty states. (It’s going to need ten Republican votes in the Senate, an unlikely prospect.)
Heath, this is causing me some problems as someone who has been very on board with the Principles First initiative. Are we sure we want to jettison thousands of years of scripturally based Christian doctrine, as well as the way marriage has been regarded worldwide?
He’d set the table for his position in an earlier tweet:
I see the GOP would now like to run on opposing gay marriages and lose another battle it has already lost once. Gay marriage is not a cultural harm—it’s a cultural benefit. More adoptive families, more stable households, less stigma, more love, more cohesive communities. Period.
What’s required to believe that that is so is signing on to a redefinition of two of the most basic terms in the English language, or, indeed, pretty much any other: marriage and family.
In what culture, anywhere in the world at any time prior to the last thirty years at the outside, did marriage ever mean lifetime union of two people of the same sex?
The retorts came in fast and furious. Most chose to ignore the second part of my “thousands of years” formulation: “has been regarded worldwide.” The common theme was that religion has no place in policy established by government, as if that were all there is to conservatism. (And, besides, most strains of conservatism regard John Adams’s pronouncement on that matter as key to understanding the American relationship between religion and government.)
One commenter trotted out the Jesus’s-most-important-teaching-is-that-we-love-one-another argument, something else I addressed in that June post:
[Christ commands us] in Matthew 22:26-40 to love our neighbors as ourselves. That's about as simple and direct as it gets.
A couple of other passages put this kind of activity in the broader context of various types of sins. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11also deals with drunkenness, slander and swindling, and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 puts it along side slave trading and perjury.
Let me pause here to say that what they’re doing at Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga, Texas is so toxic, so devoid of love, and, in fact, so batshit crazy that there is no way we can call it Christian. Go to the link to see what I mean. I feel the need to head off any potential argument that might bring it up before something like that were to get started.
Now, let's consider the Matthew 22 commandment again. It assumes I love myself, does it not? And that means grappling with aspects of myself the are decidedly unloveable. If there's anybody in need of grace, it's me.
That's how I'm to love my fellow human being. I'm to extend a grace that reflects to the best of my ability the divine grace I undeservedly get from my Lord.
One commenter wanted to ask if “we also going back to men having multiple wives and women being sequestered during their periods.”
A few people identified as PCUSA Presbyterians, making sure to identify that denomination as a mainline Protestant church.
About that: mainline Protestantism in general and PCUSA membership in particular have been in steady decline for years, and it directly correlates with that sector of institutional Christianity’s preoccupation with secular concerns, and the trend has accelerated as redefining marriage and family have become the focus.
One guy - I can’t find his response right now; there are a whole lot to scroll through - rather snidely (“since you don’t seem to have access to Google”) referred me to pre-Codex Theodosianus Rome.
Okay, let’s do a little Googling.
Per the Wikipedia entry on the Codex Theodosianus:
. . . under policy under the period of the Roman Republic . . .homosexuality was tolerated and perhaps mocked but was not illegal.
Doesn’t say anything about marriage.
If one is really interested in learning about the unusual sexual customs of cultures that came and went long ago, there’s Johua J. Mark’s article titled “LGBTQ+ in the Ancient World” at World History Encyclopedia. He covers China, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. He makes a reference to generalized “Native American tribes” that had a third gender, most knowledge of which was lost due to, doncha know, European colonization. His conclusion offers tortured readings of the Sodom and Gomorrah story as well as Romans 1:24-27, and delves into rank opining:
Same-sex relations in all of the above cultures were negatively impacted at first by Christianity and Christian missionaries before that same kind of religious intolerance was spread by Islam and even faiths such as Buddhism, which, as noted, initially encouraged same-sex relationships. This kind of intolerance is born of and fed by ignorance and fear which is perpetuated by societies and communities trying to preserve what they see as "traditional values" without understanding that among the most basic of such values is love and respect for other people.
I mention the article in order to cover that base. I can’t conceive of a conservative argument that would rely on it.
Which brings us round to my main point: Is Principles First still a conservative movement? Does it embrace such core conservative tenets as acknowledging a transcendent order which the West’s Judeo-Christian tradition gives us the clearest sense of, and acknowledgment of the indispensable contributions that a male and a female parent make to the formation of a young human being?
It seems there’s been some drift of mission. Or maybe its sense of what needs conserving is narrower than I’d assumed.
I suppose I’m glad to have found out before my involvement deepened any further.
