Category Archives: Culture war

Martyrdom in the 21st Century

Persecution of Christians in the West is psychological, not physical

Pastor Andrew Isker has written a piece on “The Psychological and Social Persecution of Christians in Current Year” With the title “Martyrdom in Trashworld”. Below are some excerpts (emphases are mine).

Stories [of Christian martyrs in the past] that show the devotion of faithful Christians give us heroes to emulate. Of course, the second you begin to apply the lessons of Christian martyrs in our age, malicious people, often within the church, will attack you. College campuses are a window into the future 15 years down the road (or maybe five or ten—the pace has quickened considerably). When I was in college nearly 20 years ago, I began to see the growing hostility to the Christian faith.

[…]

Now, simply being a Christian who believes the Bible is true and who desires to live a life according to the commands of Jesus Christ, is something which is a clear impediment to pursuing a “normal life.” A successful career, finding a spouse, and gaining the respect of your friends and neighbors, all of these become much more difficult to attain if you are a Christian living in Trashworld. Then, as now, the Christians devoted to collaborating with the enemies of Christ will say, “that’s not real persecution.” Of course, it is not the same as Richard Wurmbrand having the flesh of his feet torn off or Saint Bartholomew being skinned alive. No one would dare claim such a thing. Nevertheless, it is a real thing that is happening to us. You wouldn’t say to someone who just broke their leg and was on the ground writhing in pain, “get over yourself. I know someone in hospice with stage four cancer and has way more pain than you.” Only a monster would behave that way.

[…]

Such overt, direct persecution that came at the hands of First Century Jews, Romans, medieval governments, French Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Jihadists is not the kind of martyrdom we face. The demons that rule over us are not so direct and confrontational, not so masculine. No, the demons that rule over us are passive-aggressive and rely upon psychological and social manipulation to torment us.

[…]

If you are a Christian, you will suffer persecution for your faith. There is no way around it. That persecution isn’t always going to come in the form of men with swords or guns at your door ready to torture and kill you. But if you are a faithful man in a godless world that rages against its Creator, you are the tangible, flesh and blood representative of that Creator it is raging against. You are going to suffer. The suffering you are going to face and many of us already face is the social exclusion and intense, unremitting psychological torment of a godless society that is almost designed to get you to apostatize from Christ. There are myriad vectors and mechanisms it employs. It will use your family to pry you away. It will use corporate financial power to dangle incentives for you to compromise just a little bit. It will rob you of your children, and then hold them hostage against you. Every message, from every corner of the world is a constant, 24/7 stream of that preaches the oh-so-subtle message of: “if you believe in Jesus Christ, if you believe the Bible is true, you are a loser and we hate you. You have no place in our society. We hope you kill yourself.” That is the subtext of every form of popular culture that Trashworld pumps out. You are not being killed and tortured, but your mind, soul, and spirit absolutely are. Trashworld has perfected a kind of persecution that is even worse than lighting you on fire or feeding you to a starving lion. It has industrialized a kind of persecution of the Christian that 1. doesn’t look “like persecution,” 2. when it is successful makes it appear as if the apostate one day woke up and freely chose to just stop believing in Jesus, and 3. therefore causes Christians to not have their guard up when they face it, leaving them totally vulnerable to its pernicious effects.

But what is the answer to this problem? It is to understand that you are at war against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, no less than the saints of old. is to bear this suffering with dignity and resolve just as the heroic martyrs of the early church did. It doesn’t matter what faithless collaborating Christians say; they already have their reward. Just as St. Paul said we will suffer for pursuing a Christian life, fake Christians are going to mock us when that suffering comes. But those with eyes of faith understand we pursue a golden crown from the hands of our king. And though the scars of our persecution cannot be seen with eyes, it is a kind of suffering for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, one we should count as joy, having been found worthy to bear it. That is the perspective ancient Christians had of their suffering for the sake of Christ, and that is how we should view it as well. Whatever affliction we bear is adding to the suffering of Christ. Remaining faithful to Christ and losing out on career opportunities is a genuine sacrifice. Sacrificing a much more comfortable life so you can protect your children from those who seek to do them harm is a very real sacrifice. Being called a bigot, racist, homophobe, fascist, and every other slur because you refuse to bend the knee to anyone but He Who Rules at His Father’s Right Hand is a very real indignity and is very much worth it.

The Bible describes the suffering of Christians as filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). It may not seem like it at all, but by suffering in this way, you are conquering. Just as the blood of Christ’s people spilled out does not fall on deaf ears but cries out to heaven, so also does the anguish and terror you experience for the sake of steadfastly holding to Christ. Your duty as a Christian is to band together with those who bear Christ’s name and build real, flesh-and-blood communities impervious to the terror of the “Negative World.” Christ’s enemies are forcing us to band together, which is what we must do. We must build our own society with our own economy within the one that is collapsing before our eyes. “Negative World” is not the end of the story. There have been “Negative Worlds” many times before, and they have all been overcome by the victory of Jesus Christ. So too, will the negative world of the Globalist American Empire.

Salvation through politics

How and why this false notion keeps getting enacted

Gary North often wrote that the prevailing faith in Western societies nowadays is in “salvation through politics” or “salvation through the state”.

Nearly 30 years ago, economist Thomas Sowell laid out in his book “The Vision of the Anointed” how this falsehood works in practice. Wikipedia has an entry about that book. It says that in it, Sowell “brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations.”

In an interview from 1995 (10 minutes of excerpts from it – the full 25-minute version is here) he outlines his observations.

First, he explains who the “anointed” are: The elites in leading media, universities, law and politics. One could add nowadays: in entertainment. These people believe they know better than most what needs to be done. And thus think themselves entitled to use government force to get these things done.

If an assertion is made that fits the ideas and vision of these people, they demand no evidence. They simply assume it is true and use their many and powerful channels to plant this assertion in the public’s mind.

Regarding the implementation by these people of measures to fight a perceived societal ills Sowell outlines a four-stage pattern – which we could see very clearly in action during the Covid crisis.

1. Crisis: We’re hyped to believe that something is a terrible crisis for which Something Must Be Done. Very often, the thing we are told is causing a crisis has been “getting better for years on end”. But that gets ignored.

2. A solution for this supposed crisis is suggested. The protagonists say: This will lead to beneficial results A. Critics disagree and say it will lead to detrimental results Z.

3. The suggested solution is implemented and almost immediately we get detrimental results Z.

4. Denial phase: The protagonists of the enacted measures deny that they caused Z. Because, they say, there are many factors, there’s complexities, it’s simplistic to blame it on this.

This is what we will see down the line once the media thinks it is safe to no longer suppress the evidence that lockdowns, masks and vaccines did much more harm than good.

This is what we will hear now that “saving the climate” and “supporting Ukraine” is leading to poverty and destitution.

This is what we have been hearing when discussing soaring crime rates.

And so on.

Economists tend to see through this because they are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analysis and what is called “opportunity cost”: The cost of any action/decision is that it closes the door to other opportunities. What are they, and can we afford to lose them?

Our current elites don’t like that sort of thinking because it questions their beliefs.

Asked whether these people just don’t think their solutions might be detrimental, Sowell says there’s more to it: The solutions always gives these people more power and influence.

That is also something we see time and time again.

Covid 19 Mandates: Silencing the Opposition

Jordan Peterson speaks with Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya

From the video description:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya discuss the complete failure of the covid 19 response, the danger of handing the reins to Fauci, the proven blacklisting of Dr. Bhattacharya and others across social media (Revealed via the Twitter Files), and the continued corruption across the board regarding the pandemic.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, where he researches the health & well-being of vulnerable populations. He co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, a focused protection alternative to lockdowns. Dr. Bhattacharya has published over 160 peer-reviewed papers on medicine, epidemiology, health policy, and public health. He holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics, earned at Stanford University.

– Chapters – (0:00) Coming Up (1:18) Intro (3:09) The lie in trusting the “consensus” (6:48) Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, Stalin (8:01) The enviro-cartel: motivations (9:35) Naming names, Fauci (14:04) Presidential reminders: do you love your child? (15:05) The revolving door for regulators (18:14) Disgust as a driving factor, sins of the infected (22:09) Communal understandings (24:15) Throwing out the pandemic template (25:42) The Somerville Youth Study (27:40) Fear, propaganda, ignorance (30:22) Serious attempts to follow China’s lead (31:30) The risks that were ignored (32:50) The detriment of Covid-era schooling (35:47) First concerns over the lockdown approach (38:05) The continuing catastrophe unleashed on the poor (38:50) Swine Flu, seroprevalence studies (41:50) Serious factors and the importance of highlighting them (43:37) You can’t monetize vitamin D (44:02) Shaming the healthy and saving grandma (46:10) Refuting Jayenta’s findings, abysmal treatment, and accusations (49:50) Despite innocence, Stanford demands silence (52:28) Trauma inflicted by the forces of the mob (54:40) Nothing saves but the truth (58:11) The Great Barrington Declaration (1:04:17) Being labeled a “fringe epidemiologist” (1:07:40) Limiting the reach of the GBD (1:08:30) Protecting the public in fascist Germany (1:11:40) Silenced by intimidation, living past the risk (1:15:55) The Twitter Files: blacklisting the truth (1:19:50) Visiting Elon Musk and the Twitter headquarters (1:22:03) Zuckerberg’s offer to Fauci (1:23:00) Deposing Fauci and the vast censorship enterprise (1:25:14) Trudeau, lying to the public about MAGA conspiracies (1:27:01) The ridiculous notion that information can be harmful (1:29:30) STEM, rejecting students over their DEI stats (1:30:53) The attraction of egalitarianism, be a communist at home (1:32:55) Destruction of community and the rise of individualism (1:33:40) To the 15 leftists listening… (1:37:00) Why demonetization is such a detriment to science (1:39:50) Bhattacharya now: the Norfolk Group Document

The Church will have to reconsider its position

It is being forced into a pre-Constantinian situation of marginalisation and persecution

Bionic Mosquito has read a book by Carl R. Trueman called “Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution” (2022) and written a multi-part review.

Here is an excerpt from his final part:

Trueman concludes his book with the recognition that the narrative he has told is a somewhat depressing one for traditional Christians.   What, then, is to be done?  First, Trueman notes: face our complicity in the expressive individualism of the day.

He offers an example that makes clear the reality that every Christian in the West is, in a manner, Protestant.  We are each free to attend any type of church – all forms of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches are available to almost all Christians.  It is, if you will, a manner of expressing our individualism.

We go to the church that makes us feel good, or that doesn’t stress us too much.  In other words, where our felt needs are met.  We are more concerned with how the church makes us feel than how well the church conforms to Biblical issues that might makes us feel…uncomfortable.

Do we look back to the Reformation for the model that offers the solution to our time?  The high Middle Ages in the Western Church?  The synergy of the Eastern Church?  No.  Trueman suggests we look back to the first and second century Church, a time when the Church was also the outlaw, the persecuted minority.  A time when Christianity was a marginalized sect, little understood, considered immoral and seditious.

This idea fits with something Justo L. Gonzáles writes in the first volume of his “The Story of Christianity” (2010), which I am currently reading, in the chapter on Constantine:

“[W]hat is of paramount importance . . . is not so much how sincere Constantine was, or how he understood the Christian faith, as the impact of his conversion and his rule both during his lifetime and thereafter. That impact was such that it has even been suggested that throughout most of its history the church has lived in its Constantinian era, and that even now, in the twenty-first century, we are going through crises connected with the end of that long era.” (p. 132)

Further on, Gonzáles adds this point:

Eusebius of Caesarea, “in all probability the most learned Christian of his time” (p. 149), a contemporary of Constantine and his “ardent admirer”, wrote about him in such a way that “one receives the impression that now, with Constantine and his successors, the plan of God has been fulfilled. No longer will Christians have to decide between serving the coming reign and serving the present one – which has become a representative and agent of the Reign of God. Beyond the present political order, all that Christians are to hope for is their own personal transference into the heavenly kingdom . . . Religion tended to become a way to gain access to heaven, rather than to serve God in this life and the next.” (p. 154)

And then, Gonzáles delivers what I perceive as a great promise:

“[A]s long as the Constantinian era endured, most individuals and movements that rekindled eschatological hope were branded as heretics and subversives, and condemned as such. It would be only as the Constantinian era approached an end, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that eschatology would once again become a central theme in Christian theology.” (p. 154)

Eschatology is of course a main point discussed in the voluminous work of Gary North.

It’s also noteworthy that even in those early times “not all Christians regarded the new circumstances with like enthusiasm” as Eusebius (p. 155). The most noteworthy reactions were the monastic one and Donatism.

The monastic, one could say “escapist”, reaction to the Christian embrace of “Constantinianism” is highly interesting in that one can say that monks and monasteries did more than any other movement in the early middle ages to civilize the physical and spiritual wilderness of Europe. A point worth pondering.

The relationship between Christianity and feminism

Louise Perry has an unusual view of this

In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, author Louise Perry (“The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”) and, as stated in the video description, “director of The Other Half, a new non-partisan feminist think tank, and the host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, a podcast about sexual politics”, says (prompted video):

“I have a slightly unusual view of the relationship between Christianity and feminism.” While most feminists see themselves as being in opposition to Christianity, Perry says that feminism is an “outgrowth of Christianity“, because the “fundamental idea of Christianity, which is so different from other religious traditions” is that “weakness is strength, the first shall be last, there is something valuable, rather than being despicable, about being small and vulnerable.” She thinks that feminism “completely relies on that idea, which is by no means shared by all cultures and certainly not by the ancient Roman culture from which Christianity sprung.”

In ancient Roman culture, Perry explains, the idea that a woman slave could be sexually violated simply didn’t exist. It just happened because it was perceived as “normal”.

Perry continues: “Into that came the idea of sexual equality at least on the spiritual level – and the idea that women, even slave women, who don’t have male kin, are worthy of protection.” Meaning that the community shares that responsibility of protection.

My (PwG) comment: Now that some feminists are beginning to realise that the state is not their friend and may not protect them against men (if these men claim to be women) if it suits the furtherance of the managerial class in power, this is a powerful message that churches should be amplifying.

The mainstream media have given up on truth

The Washington Post is openly calling on news outlets to abandon objectivity.

Writes Jenny Holland:

Journalism’s brief period of objectivity was an interregnum between the rough-and-tumble newspaper class wars of the early 20th century and whatever you want to call the pantomime hellscape of today. Now, that period of objectivity is officially dead and buried. It is clear from Downie’s article that the industry has been wholly captured. What used to be thought of as a workman-like job, in which you dug up facts and presented them to your readership, has been taken over by an elite clique of pampered millennials. Members of this clique went to all the same schools and have all the same opinions. Their sworn mission is to make sure their shrinking readership knows how ideologically pure they are. Factual reality – once the king of the newsroom – doesn’t come into the equation. The king is dead. Long live the king.

[…]

There is a silver lining in this op-ed, and I found it in the comments. Judging from the people commenting under the piece, even the ultra-liberal, vote-blue-no-matter-who readers of the Washington Post were not buying what Downie was trying to sell them.

One commenter wrote:

‘What’s really happening is young reporters are using emotional blackmail and not-very-sophisticated [postmodern] sophistry to excuse themselves from professional standards. I understand why new reporters would like to be liberated from dull, but necessary, professional standards, but I don’t understand why the grown-ups go along with it to the detriment of their profession.’

The biggest problem with journalists may not even be their recent swing to the left, their intolerance of differing opinions or their backstabbing newsrooms – all characteristics of younger, woke media staff. Instead, the biggest blindspot for journalists of generations new and old is their tendency to vastly overestimate their own importance, and vastly underestimate just how few people share their outlook outside their media bubbles.

I’m not sure this last conclusion is quite right. Journalists do not “vastly overestimate their own importance”. Among the “few people that share their outlook” are the vast majority of the policy makers. And that is all that matters.