Lux Lucet

“You are of your father the devil…When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”

• John 8:44

“I can confidently say,” wrote columnist Paul Craig Roberts in a recent article, “that unless it is an announcement of a traffic accident (terrorist unrelated) or the death of some notable person, everything you read and hear from NPR and the print and TV media is false.  Roberts continued, “The ‘news’ is propaganda designed to control explanations to serve the agendas of the ruling elites.  The ‘news’ is nothing else.  The ‘news’ is extremely hostile to truth and to those who speak it.”

As someone who’s had a life-long interest in the news, politics and economics, I find it hard to argue with Robert’s assessment of the state of the news media.  All of us in the West, it matters not whether you live in the US or any other Western nation, are under constant assault by thought shaping organs of propaganda known collectively as the mainstream media.

But it’s not just the news media that are the problem.  Academia is full of liars who produce papers supporting the elite, globalist agenda on topics as diverse as the so-called “climate emergency,” transgenderism and Keynesian economics (big government and deficit spending).  If that weren’t bad enough, what used to be called political correctness, but now is more commonly known by names such as identity politics, cancel culture and cultural Marxism, has made American college campuses into possibly the most intolerant, hateful organizations in the country.  Men, and in particular, white men, are held up to open and fashionable scorn, while women, LGBTQ people and various minorities compete with one another to see who can lay claim to the most intersectional victim points, and thus be deemed worthy of receiving the most free stuff.

Our politics has become worse than useless and toxic.  The progressive (Marxist) left promises free everything to everyone with no realistic plan to pay for any of it, all the while berating ordinary Americans who produce the wealth they want to redistribute.

The conservatives, on the other hand, promise everything but conserve nothing except, perhaps, their high paying think tank sinecures, book deals and congressional seats.  The modern conservative movement in America, which can be dated to the 1950’s, has presided over the ongoing, and increasingly rapid, collapse of American civilization.   If you don’t believe this, just ask yourself, are Americans freer today than they were fifty years ago?  Is our financial system in better shape than when Eisenhower was in office?  How about public morals?

When it comes to entertainment, it’s hard to find anything but darkness.  Modern books, TV shows and Hollywood movies are openly pornographic.  And if by chance a Hollywood movie is not openly pornographic, it almost certainly is pushing some leftist agenda, usually feminism.  Feminist Disney producer Kathleen Kennedy has almost single handedly ruined Star Wars to the point that it has become unwatchable for me.

Even business, which used to be considered a bedrock of practical conservatism, have become “woke.”  Modern business leaders often seem at least as interested in pushing a leftist social agenda as they do in earning a profit for their shareholders.  In 2019 alone, Gillette ran two ad campaigns that represented an attack on men, its putative target market.  In the first case, it lectured men on, I bet you can guess, their toxic masculinity.  In the second, it openly promoted transgenderism.

For my part, I’ve switched to Barbasol.

What about the churches?  Is there any good news there?  While I can’t speak for every individual church or denomination, taken as a whole, it appears that conservative Protestants and Evangelicals are struggling.  According to a Pew survey from October 2019, the percentage of US adults who say they are Protestants declined from 51% in 2009 to 43% in 2019.

But beyond the raw numbers, even historically faithful Evangelical organizations such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) have to some degree embraced the lie. For example, noted Southern Baptist Al Mohler openly touts Marxist Critical Race Theory.  Regarding the PCA, the Aquila Report states that up to a third of PCA elders are supportive of Revoice, a pro-homosexual movement that has held conferences the past two years at a PCA church in St. Louis.

The lies. The lies. The lies.  I just can’t stand them anymore.  It seems that from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I go to bed at night, I’m bombarded with a steady stream of lies and demoralizing propaganda that are enough to make me want to move to some remote location, live off-grid and wait for the civilizational collapse that’s surely coming.

And yet, I don’t know that this is really much of a solution either.  Living off-grid may sound nice in a fantasy sort of way, but practically speaking it’s not the sort of thing most people, including probably me, would find attractive long-term.

But there’s more to it than that.  Jesus called his followers to be salt and light in a dark world.  Ignoring the lies by running away from them hardly seems to be what Jesus had in mind.  Reading the New Testament, I don’t see any call to monasticism, as attractive as that may seem at times.  Rather, Christians are called to be soldiers, and soldiers don’t run from the fight, but toward it.

So how do Christians face a hostile and unbelieving world in the 21^st century?  The same way they faced a hostile and unbelieving world in the 1^st, through faith in Christ alone.  In his famous “whole armor of God” passage in Ephesians, Paul noted that the Christian has only one offensive weapon at this disposal, “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”  As Christians, we must understand, believe and learn to apply the Word of God to the men and circumstances we come upon on our lives.

The Bible has a systematic monopoly on truth.  If 21^st century Christians are to have any success in defeating the relentless stream of lies pushed on them 24/7 by the media, academic, entertainment, political and ecclesiastical establishments, the Scriptures are their only hope.

Christians may lose individual battles, but we know who wins the war.  “Therefore strengthen the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be dislocated, but rather be healed.”

Are you sick of the lies yet?  I know I am.  Brethren, we have a great task in front of us.  In the name of Christ, let us get to work.