Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

“I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts” (Ps. 119:99-100).

Douglas Wilson acknowledges on his blog yesterday that some people do believe he steps out of his areas of expertise every once in awhile to go off on, as a minister of the Lord Jesus, the myriad things he finds objectionable.  This is what he uses in his defense.

Read it again. Telling, isn’t it?  And yet, he goes on.  And on . . . ’til you’re left with no doubt that he truly believes those very words about himself.

I find it stunning, and in an embarrassing-if-it-weren’t-so-hideous kind of way.

Now, appropriating from the Psalms to justify one’s behavior isn’t normally a good idea, although Wilson does it often, like when he encourages praying harm against one’s perceived enemies on the basis of those “I hate those who hate you,” “kick their teeth out” passages the Psalmist prays in misguided earnestness in the face of genuine persecution of which Wilson and his buddies know absolutely nothing.  We read these, and we understand that the Psalms are moderated by the Gospel, by the words of Jesus, by the testimony of Paul, and by the context in which those imprecatory words were written.  But Wilson, whose areas of presumed expertise surely include basic hermeneutics, doesn’t get that.  To understand that would be to lose all justification for his bad behavior — and I mean “all justification,” because to Wilson, only the Bible can be used to understand, justify, or support anything.

Hyperbole on my part?  Nope.

He even refuses to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, because it presumes, in his non-physicist understanding of it, to limit God’s knowledge as revealed in Scripture. 

That this is an exceedingly clumsy handling of Scripture ought to be clear to you. 

That this is an exceedingly pitiful man in desperate need of the Gospel of Jesus Christ ought to be even more so. It’s only because he’s known as a pastor and speaks as a representative of the Lord’s Church that I rebuke him as harshly as I do.  As you know, I don’t believe in judging outsiders, even though I wonder, as I look at the fruit produced, if Wilson really has a saving knowledge of Christ that’s filled him with the Spirit. 

By tomorrow I plan to post on “Christian liberty,” so that those of you who disagree with  my confronting him on his response to Obamacare understand that I do — really — understand both Obamacare and Wilson’s hatred of it.  More important, I hope to show you, through a responsible, respectful handling of the Word of God, why he is dead wrong in privileging his “rights” over the desperate suffering of others. 

But until then, if someone with the initials MP who’s been engaging with Wilson on his blog is reading this, would that person, or anyone else who wants to contact me, drop me a line at siyocreo@live.com?  Thanks — and watch this space. 

“The only thing necessary for evil to prosper is for good men to remain silent . . . ” (Edmund Burke)

Damned if it isn’t true after all . . .

“Sitting on a powder keg and givin’ off sparks . . . ”  (Bonnie Tyler)

And damned if that’s not exactly what he IS doing.

The subject, of course, is Douglas Wilson, Moscow’s very own patron saint of wildly irresponsible rhetoric and hateful anti-government sermons and screeds.  He’s on a run; last week the Supreme Court upheld virtually all of what’s been called Obamacare, and since then he’s taken to the keyboard and to the pulpit to denounce the evil present, he believes, in opening doors to decent healthcare to some 30 million people who couldn’t get it before.  It would be, in Doug’s world, harder to imagine a greater victory for Satan than that, unless you consider, as I do, that the ugly revolt its prime player has encouraged over the last week to be even worse.

In a political, social, and religious culture as unstable as ours, beliefs are largely formed by the most irresponsible and least conscionable voices in the ideological marketplace.  And where frenzy is the order of the day and violence appears more and more acceptable in response to evils real and imagined, a man who invokes obedience to and worship of the Almighty in promoting resistance to the armed and jumpy masses is as dangerous as the man who belligerently throws his lighted cigar into the tinder-dry pile of dynamite in the town square. 

But I live in Moscow, as do many of you, and while those who are forever in a locked and loaded, paranoid, hyper-macho stance are, indeed, predictably riled up, there’s distressingly little buzz surrounding, much less opposition to, Wilson’s declaration that the Affordable Care Act be resisted.  Given that the individual mandate therein is what he finds especially odious, it’s safe to conclude that the declaration, like the mandate, is meant for individuals.  It’s a dangerous, reckless response that places someone demonstrably unfamiliar with the Holy Spirit in the conscience-guiding position only the Spirit should occupy.  His flock — not simply those who attend Christ Church or Trinity Reformed, but those who attend churches in his denomination, work for him, buy his materials, and send their kids to his schools — seems not to care, although we wouldn’t know.  Dissent is as welcome there as a six-week-old St. Bernard on your aunt’s new white carpet.

Their lack of objection is lamentable, one of several factors that energize a man singularly impressed with his mastery of everything and stunningly unable to imagine a world in which it might not be true.  Nonetheless, his flock is under a heavy yoke — not, to be sure, the one offered by Jesus — and they’ll have to consider their allegiance to a man whose public behavior seems to have, although I doubt this is a finely-wrought plan approved by the elders who in most cases are financially dependent on Wilson World, the denial of the ministry of Jesus Christ under the guise of a church devoted to Him as its primary goal.

There is another audience, though, who isn’t bound by the dictates of Doug Wilson, either in pocketbook or conscience, while nonetheless sharing a great many points of agreement with him in the arena of theology.  It’s their silence that also, even especially, allows his toxic witness to flourish, even as they occupy the one position of experience, authority, and most of all commonality that would ensure them some measure of success in reforming him and a full measure of success in pleasing the Lord Jesus.

That would be the evangelical Christian pastors, all male, all Trinitarians, in Moscow who say not a damned thing to publicly rebuke him, and their congregations, who just can’t bring themselves to believe that anything particularly upsetting is happening here.  After all, they seem to think, if he’s a PASTOR, he can’t be saying anything REALLY dangerous.

In discussing the execrable content of Wilson’s latest rampage, they find greater offense at my use of “execrable” — and even more when I define it as “shit-like” — then they do at the content and likely result itself.  They either don’t care at all, and therefore are shocked and more than a little bothered by my insistence in bringing it up, or they know full well, profess to just hate it, and then do nothing that would publicly show that other people who worship Christ vehemently disagree, in the Spirit and on the basis of His word, with his call to arms.  Whether specific and literal, or rhetorical and derivatively implied, that call — that the tyranny of Obamacare and of Obama and the Feds themselves be actively resisted as an act of obedience to God — is dangerous.  Were he alone in a cell, able to influence no one and influenced himself by no one, what Wilson says (writes, preaches, does) would merely make him an object of evangelism.  He would just be a guy who sins by showing contempt for his leaders and who relentlessly bears false witness (see his contest in Blog and Mablog, where he offers $250 for the best musical score to his vicious and viciously conspiratorial — but always witty — ode to Obama and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, which comically suggests a cocaine-and-sex-fueled summit to craft the abomination we call Obamacare).  If he didn’t matter, apart from the saving of his soul, we’d just send our most experienced and kind-hearted missionary to deal with him.  And then, whatever he says, we wouldn’t give it another thought.  That’s how you deal with crazy — right?

Except that Wilson lives, works, preaches, and prospers in the Palouse’s gun culture.  This area is saturated with angry men with big guns, the use of which in this “Godly revolt” Wilson hasn’t expressly forbidden, just like he didn’t explicitly or implicitly forbid the use of violence in his 2010 Ten-Point Manifesto for resisting “tyranny” in the age of Obama.  An oversight?  Hardly.  His hatred of the man he insists is a Kenyan usurper to the Presidency is palpable; his hatred of the government that man heads is as clear as the stripes on the Confederate flag. 

And yet, because the bar for Christian character is buried in the sinful muck of acquiescense and tolerance, people insist that he’s just one guy and not that bad, certainly not affiliated with anyone dangerous or running with what his sainted mother would undoubtedly refer to as “a bad crowd.”  That would be nice if it were true. 

Except he does run with a despicable crowd, a group of bullies and bigots who welcome him easily as one of their own.  It’d be great to dismiss Wilson as a singular nutcase, until you realize the stark commonality he shares with other people who speak as he does, but with bigger audiences.  Consider his ally and fellow 21st century Black Regimenter Chuck Baldwin and his declaration that he moved to rural Montana in 2010 “to fight” — hardly just rhetorical considering his belief that when it comes to resistance to government intrusion (he believes that the Feds are planning to round up God-fearing Americans and imprison them in concentration camps) “the Mountain States just might become the Alamo of the twenty-first century, with, hopefully, better results.”  Baldwin adds, in a manful declaration of fealty to other gun-totin’ guys, that whatever the outcome, “I would rather die fighting for Freedom with liberty-loving patriots by my side” rather than “be shuttled off to some FEMA camp.”   

He means it; he’s happy to don the coat of a Black Regiment pastor and wreak revolutionary havoc in a society he believes is going to hell anyway.  Baldwin clearly isn’t considering today’s similarity to the Alamo to exist in the form of, say, indulgence in Indian tacos, and the battle won’t be something he plays out over a chessboard.

No, Moscow’s evangelical leaders comfort themselves, Wilson’s inflammatory rhetoric couldn’t possibly incite something terrible by fanning the flames of Latah County’s  Brushfire Alliance — a motley crew of militiamen, “patriots,”  2nd-Amendment devotees and bigots whose formation and activities, like those of most similar groups, spiked after the election of a Black man to the Presidency.  His words couldn’t kindle a violent response from the Palouse-area’s Lightfoot Militia, another group of “free men” just looking for threats to their liberty and well armed to defend against them, however fanciful and bizarre the call to arms might be.  Wilson’s rhetoric couldn’t resound in the hearts nor find resolution in the hands of any lone wolves whose ideas are big, whose demons are bigger, and whose ability to reason with perspective, knowledge, and context, and whose circle of responsible members of society are negligible — could it?  Of course, if Moscow’s pastors know nothing about the political climate of the day — a climate that invokes Christ as Constitutionalist-in-Chief and means it as a term of reverence — they can’t object.  Turning attention from issues of the bedroom might allow them to focus on, or at least see, the more pressing issues of the battlefield that might soon be what we used to call Latah County.  It would take some courage, some emerging from the conservative Christian bubble, but it might inspire some actual alarm at what this man and others are doing in the name of Jesus..

It’s damned ugly out there, and these brave men — not one of whom believe that I, as a woman, should ever speak from their pulpits — have, in their silence, given the rest of “Christian Moscow” permission to float along uninformed and unbothered.  The out-of-towner who hears of this and other Wilsonian follies and freak-outs will say that, after all, if Wilson really WERE saying dangerous, inflammatory, reckless things — and saying them as a pastor of an evangelical Christian church — wouldn’t evangelical pastors rebuke him?  So, they breathe with relief, it just must not be.

Hideous, that is.

But it IS hideous, and it may very well blow up, and those who lead the Body of Christ will have much to answer for.  If, that is, anyone bothers to ask.

Christ will.  And it won’t just be Douglas Wilson who’ll have something to answer for. Evil is prospering in my town, and the silence of the good male evangelical pastors around us is as effective in encouraging it as is worse of the locked-and-loaded anti-government crowd Wilson appeals to.

Douglas Wilson looked sober, stern, and statesmanlike while delivering his sermon last Sunday to Idaho Governor Butch Otter and the State Legislature — who, of course, weren’t in attendance — wherein he repeated his insistence that Obamacare is a blight on the Constitution, a threat to human liberty, and an almost unparalleled abomination to a Holy God.  He repeated his earlier call for resistance to the individual healthcare-coverage mandate the new law requires, issuing, in a sense, his own “individual mandate,” the irony of which seems to have eluded him — a battle cry for the believer to engage in revolt against the government,

Reasonable people, of course, must wonder how a presumably sane individual can link the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act to every act of evil and unGodliness history has to offer, and it wouldn’t be uncalled-for to feel a measure of horror that the same guy would usurp the position of the Holy Spirit by telling his congregants how they must respond to a government mandate. But Wilson was clearly champing at the bit to let loose with Something Prophetic, something of Lasting Power and Significance, Something to Fight Evil.  And because Wilson revels in the perceived similarities between him and fellow anti-government evilmonger Chuck Baldwin today and the “Black Regiment,” those Revolutionary War-era New England Protestant ministers who spent the week stirring up armed revolt and who then celebrated the Sabbath, resplendent in their black frockcoats, hiding behind the pulpit to defend the ensuing chaos, it seems appropriate to note that he wore a nice, blackish suit and tie.

Evidently, it’s important to get right the sartorial trappings of whatever lunatic fringe you choose to embrace, and Wilson nailed the look. The tie, especially, was impeccable.

The man wearing it?  Not so much, and not by a long shot — about as close to “impeccable,” or even “decent,” as the eternal, impassable gulf between poor Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom and the evil, selfish rich man longing to bridge it with his piteous pleas for fairness and justice.  In painting Obamacare, with its promise of providing unprecedented access to for-profit, insurer-provided healthcare for the poor, sick and marginalized, as a justice issue — one that plants him and his squarely in the role of victims — Wilson’s cries are equally piteous, as pointless as the rich man’s yelping and whining. Indeed, Wilson’s characterization of Obamacare as a threat to the free man’s liberty, family, and worship of God is so lugubriously painted and so histrionically presented that the sane person ought to conclude — would have no choice but to conclude — that they’re the impotent cries of a sad, silly little man and his slavishly devoted posse.

Yeah, you could just dismiss these as pointless, pathetic rants, with boredom from within and mockery from without as the only real consequences likely to develop.  The guy, after all, is known as a pastor — a self-made doughy academic who started a Classically Christian K-12 school and college who says he’s devoted to the Lordship of Christ in every arena of his life.  That claim is as substantial as a wad of cotton candy, based on the fruit demonstrated, but Wilson is enabled by the pitiful weakness and the astonishing credulity of the “responsible” people around them.  They take comfort in believing that there’s no reason, given that resume, to believe anything bad could come from this . . . he’s a man of the cloth, right?  A Bible teacher and the son of a pastor?  He couldn’t really be dangerous, his words couldn’t really bring to fruition something ugly, if he’s a Christian pastor . . . but he IS dangerous, and his words, sinful regardless of their effect, could easily kick-start something violent, dangerous, and entirely unChristian.

Why?  Not because of the people who listen and care and take action as much as because of those who hear, care little, and do even less to oppose him.  And that makes the latter group every bit as dangerous as the former.

(Please read previous post before diving into this one . . . )

My response to Doug Wilson’s manifesto in response to the Supreme Court’s upholding Obamacare  got me so riled up I accidentally posted it as a finished piece — but here I am a week later, still gobsmacked at the impertinence of a pastor’s insistence that his flock not only agree with him that Obamacare represents a top-down “F-you” to the liberties of American citizens, but also that they just say “no” to the individual mandate required in the Affordable Healthcare Act in order, he says, to show government how far it may or may not go in usurping the prerogatives of a Holy God.  You can read Wilson’s spittle-flecked screed of contempt on Blog and Mablog; it was posted June 29 and my response here was June 30.

So consider this Part 2, and extra points for you if you consider my premature posting of Part 1  a symptom of passionate dismay and energetic dispute rather than sloppy editing.  But, as I wrote earlier, it’s astounding to me that Wilson — who says and writes and does a lot of things that, over the years, have required me to resurrect the word “astounding” from my vocabulary — would consider Obamacare, with the individual health insurance purchase mandate that Republicans initially proposed, embraced, and promoted, something so egregious that it, above countless examples of other governmental wrongs, requires an act of civil disobedience on the part of the Christian to stand up for Biblical norms of liberty, responsibility, and taxation.  There simply is no other way to read his post-Supreme Court argument than to conclude that he is calling for Christians to opt out of the individual mandate — the only way, other than not voting for either Obama or Romney in November, to refuse to participate in this presumed intrusion by the State and thereby obey what the bloviating bishop barks.  In reading his post, you’ll agree with me, I’m sure, that I’m not only NOT taking his words out of context or practicing unfair eisegesis in analyzing them, but that not voting for Obama and not voting for Romney were lesser points — foregone conclusions that underscored, in his argument, the gross unrighteousness that got past SCOTUS goalie John Roberts, who, to Wilson, has become more than an enigma and (barely) less than a sinister double agent.

And why the hue and cry? 

Because, starting in 2014, unless the GOP overturns it and, to Wilson’s bipartisanly-reflected horror, “replaces” it with something else, the “invisible hand of the market” Austrian-school Libertarians so worship will be revealed and restricted in the area of healthcare.  Access to healthcare will be extended to millions of Americans who now don’t have it and to people with chronic health issues and pre-existing conditions, who won’t be booted out of the market by profit-driven insurers currently allowed to exercise the full measure of their ruthlessness on poor people, sick people, once-sick people, and uninsured people once the Act takes effect.  The insurers will still be profit-driven, but harnessed by those presumably God-awful-in-the-literal-sense regulations Wilson so despises in what he confidently asserts is the only Biblical point of view.  More sick people and people trying to stay healthy will be able to afford healthcare, and Wilson not only just hates it, but finds this remedy to a problem of monstrous moral and economic proportions both unConstitutional and unBiblical. 

It’s a real knee-slapper AND a true head-scratcher, this line of reasoning, to Christians in all of the other countries in the world — that is, nearly all of the First World, industrialized nations — that provide the care to its citizens that Wilson decries as unConstitutional and unBiblical.  

Which of those is most offensive to him is unclear.  Roberts, et al, have made it clear that he can’t judge it unConstitutional;  Rand Paul notwithstanding, the determination of what is and what is not Constitutional is the sole job of the Supreme Court.  While honest debate about the Court’s decision can and should continue, the finality of its determination is unlikely to be much affected by a self-ordained, self-published ministry mogul in North Central Idaho.  So now that he’s unable to pronounce Obamacare unConstitutional, Wilson must now turn to Scripture to craft a theology that elevates Libertarian selfishness and unquestioning embrace of an injustice-perpetuating, Godless free market to the status of mature Christian virtue firmly in line with both the Biblical assertion that government is given to us by God for the good and order of society and the Gospel mandate to care for the poor.  That ad-hoc theology, fine-tuned and common as it is in a sin-soaked world, does exist, but it has its origin in rock-hard hearts and the sandiest, slipperiest of doctrinal foundations.  It speaks nothing of Christ Jesus; it testifies not of the Gospel but, instead, of why humankind needed one.  We are a sinful people, ineffably given, without the Holy Spirit, to great acts of selfishness and immorality and, minus the blood of Christ, irredeemably sinful in our indifference to the poor and to the Word that liberates them — and us.  Wilson believes he has combed through and pored over Scripture to justify his hatred of Obamacare and many other examples of progressivism and social welfare, and indeed he has.  It’s just that the theology — the picture he’s drawn from it — looks nothing at all like that of Christ.  It bears a remarkable resemblance, though, to himself.  If Christ came to us as a privileged, socially powerful, belly-full and bellicose man intent on exercising mockery of the poor during the week and mere indifference to them on the Sabbath, Wilson would be on to something.  But He didn’t, and he isn’t.

In my previous post, I mentioned a few examples of government wrongs and societal evils that I believe the Christian could make a solid Biblical case for responding to by acts of civil disobedience, and those things — slavery was the first —  were so clearly wrong that even comparing them to Obamacare, in effect or in civilly-disobedient response, felt ridiculous.  But to highlight my point that Wilson is so taken by some inherent evil in Obamacare that, above and beyond other social and governmental wrongs past and present, he calls on his flock to actively resist the governing authorities — engage in civil disobedience — I’ll end with an example chilling in its relevance. 

Wilson, I know, is a Navy man; he’s made much of his “evangelism” of his shipmates and has never, in the ten years I’ve been focused on his writing, expressed grief or regret that he was involved in that branch of the service.  I know he was opposed to the Iraq War, although in the spring of 2003, when the U.S. was beginning its offense against Baghdad and virtually every other church was organizing prayer meetings to oppose the war, support the war, or ask God for the protection of our servicemen, Christ Church organized a boxing match — with categories for kids weighing as little as 60 lbs.  A fighting contest for men and boys on the eve of a war that was to take roughly 4,000 American lives and countless thousands of Iraqi lives seemed then, and now, to be more than a little out of step with Christian conscience.  But to be fair to Wilson, I understand that despite his Navy background, he was not a supporter, for whatever reason, of the war. 

It was, I believe, in the early 1980s when the U.S. government proposed naming a Navy carrier — a warship — the USS Corpus Christi, or, as the Latin scholars among us know, the USS Body of Christ.  Many Christians and many other women and men of goodwill and sentient conscience protested the official linking of the Body of Christ — the Body whose resurrection guarantees our peace, our reconciliation, our life, and our righteousness in God’s eyes — with a ship whose sole purpose was the furtherance of war. It was then and is now a blasphemy and a stench; I can think of no other governmental action so utterly clear in its evil intent than to propose naming a warship after the crucified Prince of Peace.  Wilson was young then, and I was even younger.  What I’d love to know — what, in light of his call for civil disobedience in response to Obamacare, I feel a profound NEED to know –is how young, Christian Douglas Wilson felt about the USS Corpus Christi then and how he would feel about it now.  I pray he responded in outrage, perhaps even in civil disobedience, then.  Because if he didn’t then call for protest and civil disobedience (like the nuns who chained themselves to the gates of military facilities in protest not only of the Corpus Christi, but all offensive military actions), or if he wouldn’t do it now, then he reveals himself to be a man of whom the kindest possible assessment would be the suggestion that his moral compass is, what with the demands of business and travel and family and such, more than just slightly askew.

What it would really say is that he is a man in urgent need of evangelism, a man crumbling morally under the weight of immense privilege and power, sin and satiation, who desperately needs a saving knowledge of the One who is our peace and who is our righteousness — and who is neither impressed nor fooled by any man’s ascension to the pastorate.

Every so often, someone with a soapbox — usually a privileged, white mouthpiece of the Religious Right — says something so astoundingly bizarre in its overreaction and under-coherence that I’m rendered speechless with dismay.

This one lasted about a day or so. 

But then I get over it, and I’m getting better at my rebound, which argues against the prevailing view that I’m getting more curmudgeonly as I settle comfortably into my early 50s and also suggests that when the element of surprise is missing, my recovery time is shortened.

The thing is, I’m just not very often all that surprised any more.

As I live on the Palouse longer and longer, I’m less and less shocked that the font of the foulest utterances is so very often — all together now! — the ineffably hateful and imprudent Doug Wilson.  While celebrating, along with virtually everyone else with burdensome health insurance premiums, chronic illness, limited income with no fabulously rich uncle in sight, and those concerned with social justice, the Supreme Court’s upholding of the meat of Obamacare, I decided to risk horror and check in with the Bloviator.

Oh, my.  Wilson believes that the decision was thrust him and all Bible-believing, Christ-loving, covenant-keeping Christians into a hell of Obama’s making — a hell so insidious, so viciously evil, so far-reaching in its attempt to deny the sovereignty of the Almighty One that it requires us to drop out — to just say no to Obamacarapostasy.  How does the extension of consumer-paid health insurance, the mandatory purchase thereof not terribly unlike that of the mandatory purchase of car insurance and a solution so tepid compared to the single-payer system adopted by every other industrialized nation, propel all of us into the very blood-drenched, life-snatching clutches of Satan?

Well, by virtue of the upholding of a plan whose centerpiece — the individual health insurance-purchase mandate — was originally a GOP plan, and which will protect millions of chronically ill, suddenly ill, and trying-desperately-to-not-become-ill Americans now held hostage by the profit-drivien vagaries of insurance companies.  Oh, and it means insurance companies will get less filthy rich if yesterday’s mammogram comes back with a lump (owing to my 2003 brush with breast cancer, which, God be praised, turned out to be a benign pair of lumps the size of peas), and it robs the populace of the “freedom” to opt out of the healthcare game until they get terribly sick, thus driving up costs for those of us who paid our dues — our premiums — as part of our participation in the social covenant Wilson despises.

You think I’m kidding — that I’m using a simple political disagreement to score unfair points against a man I clearly don’t like.  But the entire post, written yesterday, June 29, is still up; read it in its entirety.  For starters, though, here’s his conclusion, wherein he tops off seven points of — ahem — political analysis with a final appeal to John Calvin’s views of “the lesser magistrate,” which, as Wilson posits it, looks nothing like the magisterium of the Master:

“There is now, in principle, no limiting principle on the congressional power to tax, and the absence of such a limiting principle has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Even if Obamacare is repealed (as I now believe to be likely), this is now just a policy decision — the constitutional green light has been given. If Congress is deemed to have the constitutional authority to tax you for not doing whatever it is they dictate (eating brocoli, wearing blue tee-shirts, whatever), there is no other name for this than despotism. The fact that it is a nanny despotism helps not at all. The fact that their exercise of this authority is currently in abeyance matters not at all.

And so this means that we should resort to Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrate, and call upon our state governors and legislatures to simply refuse to comply with Obamacare. The time has come to just say no. This is because there is no form of government more fundamentally anti-Christian than a government that recognizes, in principle, no limit to what it can require. Absolute claims are the prerogative of Deity. If this decision is allowed to stand, there is no longer any limiting principle inside the Beltway whatever. It is time for the ruling class to discover that there is still a limiting principle outside the Beltway, enforced by those who believe that the only real limiting principle is at the right hand of the Father.”  (Blog and Mablog, June 29, 2012, Douglas Wilson)

In calling on Christ’s disciples to act as the needed “limiting principle outside the Beltway,” this man invites study of his justice priorities, a survey of what else he finds so abhorrent that it requires the Christian to take a stand by breaking the law.  Presumably, anything that he finds so hideous, so unjust, that Christians must make a stand for the Lordship of Christ over the specific, egregious sinfulness of an “overreaching” government must be worse than other things we should just vote, pray, or speak out against.  Unfortunately, a survey of Wilson’s stands on other areas that most sentient beings, even sentient Christian beings, find to be a gross offense to a holy God reveals that it’s the taxation nature and limitation of his “rights” that set our local hysteric’s head a-spinning.

Wilson, who co-wrote a book defending Antebellum slavery and defended the patriarchial “Christian” slaveholders and the Confederate Army as the most “Godly” Christian fighting force and population ever amassed, clearly didn’t believe slavery was an evil worthy of the believer’s civilly-disobedient opposition.  Almost as bad was his branding of evangelical Abolitionists, who did find the buying, beating, and selling of humans as an evil worthy of their active opposition, as God-haters who despised the Word of God.  But clearly, he finds no need, much less right, for Christians then to “just say no” to the despicable practice of kidnapping, buying, keeping and beating other human beings for profit — or so suggests Wilson’s unabashedly slave-defending past. 

And Wilson’s buddies in the despicable League of the South, which calls for an “Anglo-Celtic” homeland in the American South, were conspicuous in their absence during the protests that marked the Civil Rights movement — although they were quite conspicuous in their presence in upholding racial segregation.  The movement, during which protests were most often legal, and the instances of civil disobedience for the protection and full inclusion in society of our Black sisters and brothers were undertaken by Christians of color and the many brave white men and women who in many cases sacrificed their lives to stand with the poor and oppressed, was derided, at best, by his neo- and paleo-Confederate, Constitutionalist pals.  No, Wilson and his ilk didn’t find racial discrimination worthy of a civilly disobedient “no,” and in many cases were shrill in their “yes” to the “rights” of whites to treat Black people like dogs.

(continued . . . I mean, how much can you take in one post???)