A counterprotester burns a Trump 2020 flag after supporters of President Donald Trump held pro-Trump marches Nov. 14, in Washington. (Associated Press)
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.
Leviticus 25:10
As is the case with many Americans, I’ve watched with horror the violence and rioting that has gripped this nation for nearly six months now. Substantial parts of many of our largest and most famous cities lie in ruins from the predatory acts of mobs affiliated with organizations such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa.
These overtly violent and leftist organizations have, with the apparent consent of local government officials, loosed a reign of terror in America’s cities the likes of which most Americans never imagined possible.
The Covid lockdowns are another assault on liberty. As recently as the beginning of this year, who would ever have imagined we’d have government officials attempting to dictate how we celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families, or attempting to interfere with our liberty to worship the Lord in our churches? Yet the so-called pandemic has been used as an excuse for government to suspend personal liberties we nearly all took for granted, close down our businesses, put us out of work and make us dependent on the government dole.
To add insult to injury, they have slapped masks on us, which do little and perhaps nothing at all to slow the spread of the virus but are most effective when it comes to humiliating and dehumanizing people and showing them who’s boss.
Then to top it off, the Democrats committed election fraud on a shock and awe scale resulting in a Joe Biden “victory” to which we’re all supposed to accede, no questions asked.
Former vice president Joe Biden (left) and President Donald Trump (right).NEW YORK TIMES (CUSTOM CREDIT)/ASSOCIATED PRESS (LEFT)
So when they had appointed elders in every church, and prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.
Acts 14:23
They’re almost here. The most fraught elections in living memory. Maybe in the history of our nation.
With so much at stake, it seemed good to me to set in order my thoughts on Tuesday’s elections.
Should Christians Vote?
“If voting made any difference, it would be illegal.” One hears this quote from time to time. In my case, it pops up occasionally in Libertarian authors whose works I’ve read. But this is not a Christian idea. It seems to contain the idea that no matter whom you vote for, you’re going to get the exact same result. Admittedly, there is at least some truth to this. But to dismiss all voting as a useless exercise is, in my opinion, a major mistake. Voting is the Christian way of choosing men to fill government offices. This is true in both church government and civil government.
In Acts 14:23 we read, “So when they had appointed elders in every church, and prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.” The Greek word translated “appointed” is kīrotonēsantes, which means to vote or to approve by show of hands. Commentator Simon Kistemaker notes,
In Greek, the term to appoint actually means to approve by a show of hands in a congregation meeting. With the approval of an assembly, individuals were appointed to serve in a particular office. In other words, the showing of hands was equivalent to choosing officials, in this case to serve in the government of the local church (New Testament Commentary, Acts, 525).
John Gill, commenting on this passage wrote that the election of elders and deacons was done by the members of the local congregation, “who by joint suffrages declared their choice of them by the stretching out, or lifting up of their hands, as the word [kīrotonēsantes] here used signifies, and not the imposition of them.”
Now both church government and civil government are creatures of God – as Paul notes in Romans 13, civil magistrates are “appointed by God” and are said to be his ministers – and as God has seen fit to establish republican government in both church and state, it seems a good and necessary inference to conclude that, not only does the Bible permit Christians to vote in the election of civil magistrates, but perhaps even that it is their civic duty to do so. For if God has established a means of selecting officers, whether in the church or in the state, he has done so for the good of his people. If we ignore God’s provision, we ignore it at our own peril.
If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
John 8:36
Perhaps it’s trite to say this, but 2020 has been a very dark year in the formerly Christian West. Here in the United States, we’ve experienced months of violent rioting.
Marxist and racist rhetoric targeting white Americans pours forth from government, academia, churches, the mainstream media and businesses. Indeed, such rhetoric has become a commonplace in 2020 America. And those who advance such ideas, far from being condemned in the public square, are lauded as courageous truth tellers.
Aggressive homosexuals have managed to push their agenda to the point that simply denying there’s such a thing as same-sex marriage, or that a man can become a woman, can get a person in a world of trouble both politicly and professionally. A recent story in New York Magazine reveals how normalized homosexual practice has become in the United States. The story claims that, “roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT.” If true, then a large minority of American young women have “chang[ed] the natural use into that which is against nature.” Can such a civilization long survive?
In their response to Covid, federal, state and local governments have routinely trodden underfoot what were, until very recently, thought inviolable personal liberties. No let up to the lockdowns is in sight either. In fact, governments throughout the West seem prepared to crank up their violations of personal freedom and property rights with ever more stringent lockdowns. These lockdowns, supposedly designed to fight the spread of Covid, represent, in the view of this author, the imposition of arbitrary government on the formerly free nations of the West. If those who have imposed these lawless restrictions get their way, arbitrary lockdowns, mask requirements, travel restrictions, immunity passports and forced vaccinations will become a permanent way of life.
Then there’s the matter of the presidential election, just nine days away as of this writing. Americans are faced with choosing between two leading candidates. One, the corrupt, semi-senile, Roman Catholic Joe Biden – Biden most likely is a Trojan Horse for the Democrats to smuggle in the Monstrous Regiment in the person of the radical progressive and highly immoral Kamala Harris – and two, Donald Trump, who, for all his imperfections, manages to get some things right, holding to something like a traditional American understanding of personal liberty and economic freedom. Naturally, the corrupt national media blindly supports Biden and shows open disdain for Trump and his supporters. The winner for most exceptionally egregious example of media bias is NPR, which has, so far, refused to cover the explosive Hunter Biden email story linking Joe and his son Hunter to shady foreign dealings in Ukraine and China. NPR’s Managing Editor for News dismissed the Hunter Biden story, writing, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
Indeed, America, and the West more broadly, seem to be at a major inflection point. If present trends continue, it’s hard to see how Western Civilization survives much longer, if it isn’t already dead, except in remnant form.
The Post published two more stories related to the first. You can read them here and here.
If true, and it is the opinion of this author that the emails are genuine, the revelations in these stories ought to be enough to force Joe Biden’s resignation as Democratic presidential candidate. Not that this will happen. It almost certainly will not. But in any nation where a Christian view of right and wrong holds, using one’s official position to enrich oneself at the expense of the nation one is supposedly serving is not only a sin, but a crime.
Public officials on the take is one of the chief characteristics of corrupt nations. Speaking of the degeneracy of Judah in his day, the prophet Isaiah wrote of the nation’s political leadership, “Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards” (Isa. 1:23). In times past, Isaiah tells us, Jerusalem, “was full of justice.” But now it was corrupt. It had become a sort of banana republic.
Much more could be said on the topic of corruption, both of Joe and Hunter Biden and of government In the United States more generally, but that is not the main focus of this post, so I will leave it at that.
Getting a bit closer to our main topic, receiving almost as much attention last week as the Hunter Biden stories themselves was the blatant censorship of them by the major social media companies. For example, the main Twitter account of the New York Post (NYP), the newspaper that broke the stories, was locked, as was the account of President Trump’s press secretary and that of the Trump campaign itself, all because they shared links to the first of the stories released on Wednesday, October 14.
Facebook likewise made it difficult to share the link on its platform. Andy Stone, a former Democratic political operative and current Facebook employee, tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
So, we have a former Democratic operative working to reduce the distribution of a story unfavorable to Joe Biden on Facebook. No election interference to see here!
Of course, Twitter’s and Facebook’s quick actions to suppress and discredit the Hunter Biden story should surprise exactly no one, given the blatant attacks on free speech from the social media companies in recent years.
Although censorship in various forms had been going on for some time previously, it was in August 2018 that the social media giants really raised their game. Most notably with the banning of Alex Jones from all the major social media platforms in the course of one or two days early that month.
Since that time, the purges have not ceased. Just last week there was another wave of purges from YouTube, with several established and large channels being removed as if they never had existed.
As with the recent revelations about Hunter Biden and how he leveraged his connection to his highly placed father to enrich himself, much more can be said about the censorship problem on the social media platforms. But as this also is not the main focus of this post, I likewise will pass over commenting further on this matter for now.
As the title of this post suggests, the main focus of this post, and likely the next few posts, will be on making the Christian, Biblical case for free speech.
As if 2020 weren’t already tumultuous enough, the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has managed to stir things up even more.
Talk, not only of Ginsburg’s death, but also of her replacement, has dominated the news since her death on Friday, September 18. Perhaps the most notable feature of the discussion has been controversy about whether Donald Trump should name her replacement now or wait until after the November election.
This is a discussion that should not even come up. The president has the right to nominate a justice to the Supreme Court and the Senate has a right to hold confirmation hearings. About this there is no question. The Democrats don’t like it, but their not liking something is not the same as it being illegal or unconstitutional.
Noteworthy but unsurprising was the reaction of many Democrats to the possibility that Donald Trump would nominate a new justice to replace Ginsburg before the election. Not only did they argue that a nomination of a new justice must wait until after the election, but actually threatened violence should the President and the Senate attempt to carry out their constitutionally mandated duties.
And the threats of violence were not coming from some dark corner of the internet or from obscure people, but from several high-profile Democrats and progressives on Twitter and other high-profile platforms. Reza Aslan, a writer who has written numerous books, produced a series on world religions for CNN and is currently a professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside, took to Twitter and threatened that, “If they [the Republicans] even TRY to replace RBG [Ginsburg] we burn the entire…thing down.”
Canadian professor of Political Science Emmett Macfarlane tweeted, “Burn Congress down before letting Trump try to appoint anyone to SCOTUS.”
Scott Ross, a member of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission tweeted, “If you can’t shut it down [the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice], burn it down.”
Playwright Beau Willimon commented on Twitter, “We’re shutting this country down if Trump and McConnell try to ram through an appointment before the election.”
In the pages of GQ, writer Laura Bassett threatened, “If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.”
It’s tempting to say that such threats have become the modus operandi of Democrats and progressives in recent years. But in truth, Democrats and progressives have a longstanding tradition of using violence and threats of violence to get their way. It’s how they roll. Not for nothing did Samuel D. Burchard refer to the Democrats as, “the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Burchard made the comment in 1884. It was true then, and it is true today.
Since the matter of selecting a new justice is a matter of supreme importance both to Democrats and Republicans, and since the upcoming Senate confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg, promises to dominate the headlines in the coming weeks, perhaps overshadowing even the upcoming election, it seemed good to this author to take the opportunity to weigh in.
When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.
2 Kings 11:1
“To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice.”
To modern ears could a more offensive sentence be found in all of literature? Not having read all of literature, this author does not pretend to be able to answer that question definitively. Yet with that said, it is hard to imagine an idea more repugnant to 21st century readers than this quote from John Knox’s essay “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” (hereafter, TMR).
We have, all of us living in the West in the early 21st century, been steeped in feminist theory from our youth up to the point where, for most of us, Knox’s words are little more than noise from a bygone era with no relevance for us today, except perhaps as a cautionary tale to warn us about how bad the bad old days really were.
Liberal Democrats, were they to read Knox, would quickly be triggered, alternating between outrage, ridicule and calls to have his ideas removed from social media. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, would attempt explain away what Knox wrote by saying that he was a product of his age, that what he was really writing against was 16th century liberal women and that if he were alive today he would gladly support a female presidential candidate so long as she was pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and promised to fight against the Green New Deal.
When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.
2 Kings 11:1
“I wouldn’t vote for her.” That was Ayn Rand’s curt response to a question from a woman in the audience of the Phil Donohue show. She had asked Rand, “Do you believe that there is going to be a day when there is going to be a female in the White House as President and how do you feel about that?”
From the questioner’s reaction and from that of the audience, Rand’s answer was not expected, neither was it appreciated. You can see the 1979 clip for yourself here:
Worth noting is how shocking and controversial Rand’s statement was as far back as 41 years ago. Now this was the Phil Donohue Show, and Donohue himself was a feminist, and his audience, most likely, tended to skew liberal. But that said, it is not clear that the audience reaction from a conservative Republican audience would have been much different. Certainly in 2020, any Republican expressing anything remotely approaching Rand’s statement would quickly find himself making an apology tour.
There have been rumors for some time that Trump has wanted to see his daughter in the Oval Office, and the prominent role she had at last month’s Republican Convention and the statement reported in Business Insider certainly support those rumors. It would not shock this author to see Ivanka declare herself as a presidential candidate in 2024 with the full blessing of her father. Of course, she will have other female rivals to the throne, quite possibly including former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
In fact, it would not surprise this author at all if the 2024 election doesn’t bring us the choice between a Republican woman and a Democratic woman presidential candidate. It’ll be pick your poison. Of course, the conservatives and liberals will tear one another apart with each side passionately denouncing the choice of the other party, while both parties miss the fundamental error they are committing. That is to say, both sides will be equally ignorant that, in the words of John Knox, “To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice….”
Yes, way back in 1558 John Knox dropped the mic, so to speak, on the matter of government by women in his devastating treatise “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.” In it, Knox did not argue, as so many feminized men are prone to argue today, that this or that woman was unfit to hold public office because of her position on this or that issue. No, Knox’s argument was more fundamental and more Biblical than that. Knox argued that the Bible prohibited women from severing in civil government altogether.
Knox was right.
After reading it, I want to stand, applaud and praise the Lord for the insight and courage that he gave the Scotsman.
So impressive is “The Monstrous Regiment” that had Knox done nothing else in his life except to write that treatise, it would be enough to qualify him for Christian hero status. Without a doubt, “The Monstrous Regiment” is one of the greatest political treatises ever written by a Christian and a serves as a model for how Christian scholars ought to use the Scriptures when dealing with political questions.
Let’s take a closer look at Knox’s work to see if we can identify what makes it so devastating.
For our walk through, I’ll be using the Trinity Foundation’s edition of “The Monstrous Regiment” titled “The Place of Women.”
Worth noting is that “The Place of Women” was first published by the Trinity Foundation in August 1984, most likely as a response to Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his vice-presidential running mate in that year’s election.
Since that time, other women have followed in her footsteps, most notably Sarah Palin, who served as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Hillary Clinton who headed the Democratic ticket in 2016, and now Kamala Harris who’s Democrat Joe Biden’s pick for vice-president.
Black Lives Matter protesters march through Portland, Oregon on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.
Isaiah 1:7
Is America under the judgment of God? Many Christians think so, this author among them.
Some of our largest, most prosperous and best-known cities are literally burned with fire and will take years to recover, if they ever do. Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York have seen massive riots and property destruction on a level that few Americans could have imagined just six months ago. On the internet one can view the daily, destructive handiwork of Antifa in Portland and Seattle. The Portland riots have been going on for three months now and show no sigh of abating. In fact, the riots may be spreading, as there are reports just today (8/23/2020) that the sort of disturbances that have been going in the Portland have spread to Denver.
Our political system is a mess. The Democrats have veered off in a radical socialist/social justice direction. So overt is their radicalism that it has caused concern even among some of the older, mainstream liberals in the party. The Republicans, relatively speaking a saner bunch, have nevertheless lost their moorings in many ways. There was a time, not all that long ago, when Republicans at least pretended to be the party of fiscal restraint. Yet under President Trump debts and deficits have exploded and almost no one says a word. When Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) objected to the house passing the budget busting $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill without a vote, he was denounced by President Trump as a, “third rate Grandstander.” Trump went on to say that Massie should be thrown out of the Republican party. That was Massie’s reward for standing up for the Constitution.
Lux Lucet 