Mother’s Day Reflections
“If the Jacobin theory be true, then women must be allowed access to every male avocation, including government, and war if she wishes it, to suffrage, to every political office, to as absolute freedom from her husband in the marriage relation as she enjoyed before her union to him, and to as absolute control of her own property and earnings as that is to make Christians face this plain question: Will you surrender the inspiration of the Scriptures to these assaults of a social science so-called? If not, what?…Doubtless, during this long and tremendous conflict we shall see the same thing repeated which we have seen in recent decades: timid and uncandid minds, anxious still to ‘ride a fence’ after it is totally blown away by the hurricane of anti-christian attack, attempting to reconcile opposites by various exegetical wrigglings. But we shall again see it end in futility, and candid assailant and candid defender will both agree that the Bible means what it says and must either fall squarely or must stand by the overthrow of all attacking parties.”
R. L. Dabney – Southern Prophet & Theologian
Discussions, Vol. 3, p. 501, 503)
Mother’s Day 2008 has now come and gone but I would like to spend just a little time reflecting on ‘Mother’s Day’ and the family in general in the West on the day after.
One case I keep trying to make is that the varying cultus that form all religions have powerful implications for cultures in every area of life. The cultus makes the culture and the culture manifests the existence of the cultus. The relations of cultus to culture is like the relation of radiant heat to the sun. One can and should make distinctions between the sun and the radiant heat it produces but obviously where there is radiant heat that is sun produced there is a sun to account for it. Similarly, the cultus is the sun that produces the radiant heat of culture. They are distinct but interdependent and contrary to some ‘thinking’ you cannot have a cultus that does not create a distinct culture.
If we push the metaphor just a little further we would note that different suns will produce different types of radiant heat. The same is true for cultus and culture. Cultus of a different character will produce different culture. Islam as cultus produces one kind of culture, Christianity as cultus yields another kind of culture, Escondido as another kind of cultus produces yet a third kind of culture and on and on it goes. All of this is just to say that by the (cultural) fruits of a cultus you will know it.
All this is introduction to the observation that where a culture significantly changes it changes because somewhere the cultus has changed. Nowhere has culture changed more clearly and more significantly in the West in the last 70 or so years then in the role of women, the esteem of motherhood and family life.
In family life the West and America has experienced a cultus earthquake and a culture tsunami that is washing away the previous cultus and cultural norms, which is just a colorful way of saying that we are experiencing a worldview shift.
Reformed theologian Dr. Harold O. J. Brown put it this way a few years before his death,
“Since the end of WW II American society has been suffering decomposition and deconstruction. Consider what we have come to in seven decades. The distinctiveness of marriage has been abolished (Baird v. Eisentadt)…; the mother’s womb has become the most dangerous place for a baby (Roe v. Wade, et al.); the rights (but not the duties) of fathers and parents of minor girls have been voided (Planned Parenthood v. Danforth); divorce has become easier than marrying…; and now the natural distinction between male and female is being abolished. (Goodridge, Lawrence, etc.)…Pornography is everywhere.
The structure of American society is being demolished brick by brick. Within a few short years, Americans will have reached the ‘liberty’ desired by Jean-Jacques Rosseau, the abolition of every particular dependency. This is what Hannah Arendt called the ‘atomistic mass,’ a precondition for the establishment of totalitarianism.”
Dr. Harold O. J. Brown
Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces: Charging Towards the Dies Irae
Only the blind, the willing fool, or the historically obtuse can fail to see the cultural shift in family life that we have been in for quite some time now. What many fine people fail to understand though is that this cultural shift is a result of a shift in our national cultus. The reason that they fail to see it I think is for three reasons. First, because the shift has been incremental. Second, because, like candles being made by being dipped into wax repeatedly, Christians have been so dipped in this new cultus and culture that they fail to recognize it for what it is. Third, Christians have loved ones who have embraced this new family culture and the cultus that it is born of and they would rather be loyal to their family members then be loyal to Christ.
The family shift I am speaking of shows itself most clearly in the ongoing extension of our hyper-egalitarian culture. The hyper-egalitarianism was born originally in the garden, though in our time it has flowered most in the post-revolutionary West as initiated by the French Revolution, sustained by the Communist Revolution and kept in full bloom in today’s Universities in the West. This hyper-egalitarianism accounts for the change of divorce laws in the 70’s in America that made divorce easier and the lives of women and children harder. The great justification for easier divorce laws is that it made the whole process more equitable. This hyper-egalitarianism working with birth control methods erased the distinctiveness of Marriage so that by implication, the right of unmarried couples to engage in potentially procreative sexual intercourse was equal to the right of married couple to engage in potentially procreative sexual intercourse. This hyper-egalitarianism accounts for abortion laws as the ‘right’ to abortion made a woman equal to a man in her potential for promiscuity without consequences. This gender blender cultus and the cultural hyper-egalitarianism that radiates out from it accounts for the desire of women to have a significant career (unlike the worthless task of being a mother) thus giving them the opportunity to show that they are as ‘good as any man.’ Once a marriage embraces the hyper-egalitarianistic position of ‘career woman,’ the next step is children in daycares, latchkey kids, and home and family being reduced to a kind of bed and breakfast routine.
What I describe above is the familial shift I mentioned at the beginning. The hyper-egalitarians won’t be satisfied until all the parts are interchangeable. Women and men are the same. Children and adults are the same. Married and single are the same. Heterosexuals and Homosexuals are the same. All the gods are the same. All cultures are the same. All ethnicities are the same. All races are the same. All distinctions are social constructs that must be eliminated. Its all really quite beautiful if you like staring at the remains of a garbage disposal.
Make no mistake about it. The new god that is running the new cultus in the West and in America is a hermaphrodite, and he/she/it won’t be happy until all distinctions are erased – whether those distinctions are sexual, gender, ethnic, religious, racial, economic, or cultural. The hermaphrodite god of the West is pursuing a least common denominator bland sameness which means that it is pursuing a hyper-egalitarianism that will leave us all equally miserable except for the ruling elite cultus class.
My analysis is old stuff. Abraham Kuyper saw it coming at the turn of the 20th century,
“Modernism which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.” (A. Kuyper – Lectures On Calvinism p. 27)
The difference between my analysis and Kuyper’s is the difference between the Doctor who warns the recently addicted smoker of the long term consequences of smoking and the Coroner who examines his remains 50 years later concluding that his charred and tarred lungs is what killed him. Kuyper analysis was far more impressive. My analysis is simply postmortem.
Now it is not as if our current cultural familial shift is the first time this fecal bovine remains has been pursued. This is just a page from the works of Mary Wollenstonecraft’s ‘Rights of Women’ and the writings of Olympe de Gouges of French Revolution fame in the 18th century. In the 19th century the Communists of Russia had ambitions to change the role of women and the role of family. Indeed, the 1918 communist family code, was the “most ‘progressive’ family legislation the world had ever seen.”
The team at Vision Forum recently came up with a couple great Lenin quotes that reflect this anti-Christ hyper-egalitarian vision for women and family.
We must now say proudly and without any exaggeration that apart from Soviet Russia, there is not a country in the world where women enjoy full equality and where women are not placed in the humiliating position felt particularly in day-to-day family life. This is one of our first and most important tasks…Housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman…The building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been emancipated from that petty stultifying, unproductive work…We are setting up model institutions, dining-rooms and nurseries, that will emancipate women from housework…These institutions that liberate women from their position as household slaves are springing up where it is in any way possible…Our task is to make politics available to every working woman.
And from another Lennin speech,
The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labor, to liberate them from ‘domestic slavery,’ to free them from their stupefying [idiotic] and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery. This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction, both of social technique and of morale. But it will end in the complete triumph of Communism.
These excerpts ought not to sound unfamiliar to our ears. We hear this message in a thousand venues in our culture today. Indeed, we hear it so much that I sometimes wonder who the victor really was in the cold war. Is it the case that as the Greeks conquered the victorious Romans culturally the victorious West has been remade in the image of the culture that it putatively vanquished? As just one example that reflects well Lenin’s ‘family is drudgery’ that emanates from the West I offer a recent speech given by Harvard Psychology Professor Dr. Daniel Gilbert,
“People’s happiness goes into steep decline after they have children, and never recovers its old level until the children leave home. As a source of pleasure, playing with one’s offspring rates just above doing housework but below talking with friends, eating, or watching TV, research has shown.
Yet people invest so much time and money in their children, and focus on the fleeting moments of joy they bring, rather than on the long periods of boredom and irritation, that most continue to believe children will bring them happiness.”
It goes from bad to worse. It would be bad enough if this were clearly seen for the paganism that it is but instead what happens today is that large segments of the Church are trying to give this anti-woman, anti-family bilge a chocolate Christian coating. Read Rev. Oliver ‘Buzz’ Thomas in a recent column he wrote for USA Today,
In the interest of preserving our planet and our species, shouldn’t religious organizations be encouraging smaller families? Do our spiritual leaders need additional divine revelation to realize that our current doctrines — which threaten to take the entire world down with us — have become ethically and theologically questionable?
How should people of faith respond to this gathering environmental storm?
First, we must stop having so many children. Clergy should consider voicing the difficult truth that having more than two children during such a time is selfish. Dare we say sinful? The average American might not listen to his elected representatives, but he darn sure listens to his pastor. This will be a hard message for pastors to preach and parishioners to hear.
Now Buzz writes this in 2008 and contends that it is Christian. But is Buzz channeling Jesus or is he channeling Margaret Sanger who could write almost the same exact thing in 1920,
The Most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families….The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the members of those families but in their injury to society….The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself enough to condemn large families as immoral.
(The real tip though that ‘Buzz’ is rowing with only one oar in the water is confirmed by his hallucinatory notion that the average American ‘darn sure listens to his pastor.’)
Nobody ever accused Vladimar Lenin or Margaret Sanger of being Christian but what we are doing in the West by practicing the hyper egalitarianism and gender dyslexia of Lenin and Sanger is to actually make them Saints in our churches – where we push for Women in Pulpits, in our cultures – where we push for women in foxholes, and in our families – where we push for women as chief breadwinners. All of this is to multiply our sin by a factor of 10 as we insist that our disobedience is in fact what God really requires of us.
What is happening in the West today is the competing of two visions derived from two competing cultus and two competing gods. The he/she/it goddess ‘Hermaphroditee’ provides the radiant heat of a cultus and culture that would erase all Biblical distinctions. The God of the Bible has centered around Him a cultus and culture that would honor the diversity and distinctions that fell from His hand. Culturally speaking, this is where the battle is joined and this is where the battle rages. Whether we are talking about the culture of divorce, or the culture of out of wedlock pregnancy or the daycare culture, or the homosexual culture or the problem with role confusion, or the push for females in the pulpit (regardless of whether or not those females are men or women) this is the flash point of the battle between the competing cultus. We must take this one step further and recognize that this hyper-egalitarianism that has Christians confused over the God ordained distinctions between men and women likewise would have us confused on the God ordained distinctions between people groups and cultures. I really don’t know how it is on one hand that we can consistently rail against hyper-egalitarianism as it pertains to men and women and yet be supportive of hyper-egalitarianism where it seeks to build a one world ethnicity to go with its agenda of a one world government.
This demonic pursuit of hyper-egalitarianism also explains our problems with the State.
The cultus of Hermaphroditee is unitarian. Unitarian religion will always ignore diversity for the sake of uniformity in order to better reflect the singular nature of its god. Now what has happened is the State has has become the chief spokesman for the Bitch goddess ‘Hermaphroditee.’ Perfectly aping Islam the Hermaphroditee cultus would have us recite ‘there is no god but Hermaphroditee and the State is his/her/its messenger.’ Because the State is the chief prophet much that the State does is in pursuit of bringing Hermaphroditee’s hyper-egalitarianism will into place.
We started this post on the issue of Mother’s day. I suppose we have wandered a long way from the idea of Mother’s day. The point that I would like us to take from this pertaining to Mother’s day is that unless Christians are willing to fight against the competing vision that we have described in this post – a vision that is attempting to swallow the West whole our Mother days are numbered. In order to have Mothers you have to have women and in the hyper-egalitarianism cultus and culture of Hermaphroditee the distinction between men and women is lost and whats more the idea of Mother’s day in a Hermaphroditee culture is bigoted because it assumes that children need women as mothers.
There is no longer any time left for the Church or the West. Either we must cast this thinking out of our bosom or we must become as thoroughly ugly as the bitch goddess Hermaphroditee that we serve.
