“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.