While attending the Lansing Tea party, and while listening to reports of other tea parties it became apparent that Americans are hopelessly in love with saying the pledge of allegiance. The irony of hundreds of thousands of Americans gathering to protest government oppression all the while reciting a pledge that was created and legislatively exalted with the express purpose of uniting people to the unitary state was surreal. It was like viewing people who gathered to protest their enslavement opening their ceremony with a ritual that sang the praise of chains.

I hate the pledge of allegiance for the following reason,

1.) It was written by a Baptist minister (Francis Bellamy) who identified himself as a Socialist and was even defrocked for preaching that “Jesus was a socialist.”

2.) Francis Bellamy once admitted that one purpose of the pledge was to help achieve the totalitarian (socialist) fantasy that his cousin (Edward Bellamy) once wrote about in one of his novels.

3.) By forcing generations to plight their trough to the Nation State more important bonds of loyalty to family and church were implicitly superseded. As such a civil religion and nation state family were created.

4.) The Constitution does not, and never has taught, that the nation is indivisible.

5.) Between 1892 when the pledge was written until 1942 the pledge was said with the right arm stiffly held out with the right hand palm up. Can you say Hail Caesar? Heil Hitler?

6.) The pledge of allegiance is a paean of praise to the borg Nation State.

Since Americans are apparently hopelessly stuck on sentimental pledges, allow me to suggest a pledge for the next batch of tea parties.

I pledge allegiance to the U.S. Constitution
And to the Constitutional Republic it created
Sovereign states bound
by a dissoluble compact
committed to limiting the actions of tyrannical government
against all

http:www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/04/16/garofalo_tea_parties_about_white_power.html

“The mainline media concludes that the tea parties were attended by “all white” people who were “a bunch of racists,” and it was all about “hating a black man in the White house.” Again, the attendees were all “tea-banging rednecks.” MSNBC broadcast the opinion that any minority conservatives who did attend the tea parties were identified as “those suffering from Stockholm syndrome.” Stockholm syndrome is the syndrome where a kidnapping victim begins to psychologically identify with their kidnappers.”

I quote this because I believe this mindset is typical of many Americans who consider themselves not racist.

In this banal interview we learn that in order to avoid being considered a white racist one cannot oppose command and control, centralized governments. Indeed, the interview seems to suggest that what makes racist white people racist is that they are opposed to being enslaved by the Federal government.

So, what it means to be typically white and a part of typical white culture is to be for individual freedom and individual responsibility. Anybody who is a minority that is for these things must have a psychological disease. Hence, minorities that attended the tea parties were, according to MSNBC, acting like white people. White people who act this way are to be pilloried and insulted. Minorities who act like white people are apparently to be pitied. This attitude explains the hatred that many black people had and have for Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas, according to this theory, is behaving white by believing in individual responsibility.

It would seem necessary then to conclude that the superior non-white people and non-white culture is that people and culture that desire to be in slavery to the state, and that which opposes individual freedom and individual responsibility. If a white person wants to be part of the superior non-white culture they have to abandon notions such as personal responsibility and be in favor of some form of collectivism.

Do minorities really desire that what it means to be “Black” or what it means to be “Hispanic” be defined as a culture that is dependent upon the state, as a culture that is for personal irresponsibility, as a culture that desires to be forever beholden to handouts, and as a culture that defines racism and prejudice as being that mindset that opposes those very same things?

You see, I’m confused by all this because if that is what racism means then I am a racist and it would seem to my thinking that everybody should want to be a racist.

“If you are receiving government payments in any of its redistributive forms, then you have no business going to one of these events (Tea-Parties). Food stamps, student loans, subsidized housing, public schooling, and so on — your time would be better spent just staying home and trying to figure out how to disconnect the oxygen hose yourself. Refuse the benefits first.”

Doug Wilson

This is why the tea parties, while stirring, won’t accomplish much. We already are past the entitlement tipping point. How many social security recipients were out 15 April? How many school teachers were out 15 April? After all, Government schools are the biggest works programs this nation has. Do protesting school teachers really desire to reduce the size of Government? How many veterans were out 15 April? Do veterans really desire to reduce the size of Government?

Obviously, this is not to say that some ways that Government spends money are legitimate and as such some employees who receive government money are legitimate. All of this is only to suggest that as a nation we are already compromised. To many piglets trying to get to the teats to really want to kill the sow.

Mind you, I don’t fault all the piglets for trying to get the milk of government largess anymore then I would fault a crack baby for desiring the drug it was hooked on quite apart from his or her choice. Many people are government dependent quite apart from their choice.  One has to only think of not only children eating off of groceries coming from food stamps, but also one needs to remember the cottage industries that grow up around Government largess. Think of all the copying machines and office supplies that private businesses sell to public schools and government offices. Government money and dependence on government largess in the private sector is ubiquitous. Trying to pull apart the culture of government benefits from the US citizenry and the private sector would be like trying to pull juicy chewing gum out of stringy hair.

The Church struggles with providing a solution to all this. Ideally, we would try to care for our own, but since the individuals in Churches are already taxed at such a high rate, it is difficult to expect members to give enough, beyond a tithe, so that the Church can care for her own. It is expecting a great deal of people to finance, through their taxes, the States irresponsible social services while at the same time finance, through their offerings, the Churches responsible social services. One can only spread butter so thinly over humongous portions of bread.

We have created a entitlement culture, replete with all the cottage industries that spring up around any major job and benefits supplier. We have forced many people to either suck at the teat of the Government sow or die. (If you doubt this imagine what would happen to elderly people who refused to take the government benefits associated with prescription drug use.) If and when the State nationalizes health care there won’t be anybody left who won’t getting milk from the Wet Nurse State. Because of this there are no easy answers in how to extricate ourselves from this tar baby entitlement culture we’re stuck on and with. Because of this our Freedom as a people is completely compromised. None of us are really free.

To be honest it is our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who should have been out Tea(ing), but many of them were to busy voting for Johnson’s Great Society or Roosevelt’s New Deal or Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal. The, so called, “greatest generation” failed us miserably on this score. It was these generations that laced our tea with arsenic and now we have naught to do but bravely drink it down.

Of course, none of this means we shouldn’t fight to the very end. But we must fight with eyes wide open. We are a defeated people and culture in the twilight of our eclipse. The best we can hope for is to make some kind of glorious last stand that some minstrel might capture in song, and that might be remembered by generations yet to come, who, remembering our final effort, might use it to inspire future generations to build Christ honoring culture.

Some will suggest that this is overly pessimistic. I will be accused of having lost my postmillennialism. However, postmillennialism should not require us to be Pollyanna about reality. One can be a postmillenialist and at the same time believe that the West will fail. There is nothing about the West that guarantees that God won’t continue to bring the judgment we deserve.

Today at 12 Noon I joined over four thousand other citizens in Lansing, Michigan at the Capital and exercised my first amendment right of assembly. The crowd consisted of an overwhelmingly white demographic, though the best speaker, by far, was a black minister who gave the invocation and benediction.

While there I was trying to be an observer as well as a participant. As an observer what struck me was that this was a protest movement that was bringing together people who are put off by a confluence of issues. There were signs against taxation. Signs against spending. Signs against the Federal Reserve. Signs against illegal immigration. Signs against Obama. Signs against socialism. Signs against robbing children’s future. Many signs invoking John Galt. Signs against the government’s assault on the second amendment.

Some of my favorite signs were,

1.) A sign with a picture of Obama holding a Vaseline jar with the words coming from Obama, “This is the only stimulus you’re going to get.”

2.) A sign with a picture of Obama with lipstick on and words that said, “You can put lipstick on a socialist but he’s still a socialist.”

3.) A sign that had pictures of “Mao,” “Lenin,” and “Castro,” with the words, “Other Community Organizers.”

4.) A sign that said, “End The Fed … It owns enough already.”

The one theme that tied all the signs together was a deep seething anger at a government that is seeking to steal the freedoms of Americans, while seeking to be an agency that “spreads the wealth” around. The people in Lansing clearly understood, to a degree, the dangers of command and control government.

I say “to a degree” because there are still some things that these kinds of American’s don’t yet get. This was seen by the insistence of opening the Tea Party with the pledge of Allegiance. These Americans are angry with their government but they do not seem to yet realize that if any solution to what they are angry about is going to present itself, it is very likely going to be the solution of secession. The pledge of allegiance doesn’t allow for secession – “One nation indivisible” – and so it seems a bit contradictory to be reciting the pledge. There was also the invoking of great presidents like “Abraham Lincoln” and “Theodore Roosevelt.” These are two presidents that are largely responsible for bringing us to the point that we are currently at in terms of centralized government.

And then there was the issue of foreign wars. Naturally, middle America loves its military and its foreign wars and that was a theme that was played up today. Unfortunately middle America needs to realize that they will never get their beefs about the Welfare state satisfied as long as they keep supporting the Warfare state. Welfare & Warfare go together in a centralized state like Obama and trillion dollar deficits and until middle America realizes it is not America’s job to do nation building middle America will continue to be raped by confiscatory taxation.

The speakers in Lansing were lame and served up mostly Ra Ra material. The one factoid I did learn that was interesting is that Michigan has recently created legislation that would require yoga training schools to be licensed. Of course there will be a licensing fee involved. Most of the speakers cited the excessive taxation, citing facts that most of the crowd there likely already were familiar with.

The important thing about this tea party was for people to see that there are other people out there that are tired of being used as the government’s ATM machine. The major regret that I had is that the speakers didn’t make it clear that this tendency towards centralized government is not a uniquely democratic problem. I wish the speakers had made it clear how wicked Bush and the Congressional Republicans had acted regarding fiscal responsibility while they were in office. Middle America has to realize that though Obama is spending Trillions to Bush’s 100’s of billions, they were two peas in a fiscally rotting pea pod.

Finally, I hope middle America doesn’t think that anybody in Washington is listening to them and or to these protests. Instead, what Washington is doing is spinning all of this protest as the actions of right wing extremist terrorists. Instead of listening Washington is declaiming that these people are the enemy of the state.

I continue to fear that all of this is not going to end well.

Herbert Spencer lived from 1820-1903. If T. H. Huxley was Darwin’s bulldog, Herbert Spencer was Darwin’s prophet. Spencer was the creator of what came to be called “social Darwinism,” an aspect of Darwinism that has been far more successful in corrupting the Christian mind then “Scientific Darwinism” could have ever hoped to achieve.

Spencer translated Darwin’s views on origins into a philosophy and into a Worldview. The work of Spencer made him the most influential intellectual in America from 1870-1900. So influential was Spencer that it was impossible to be an academic in any field during this time without being familiar with and without mastering Spencer.

Essentially what Spencer sought to do was to take Darwin’s view of origins and make it the unifying principle that applied to every area of academic thought. Spencer took Darwin’s evolutionary principles as his presuppositional starting point and developed social Darwinism by writing on everything from political theory, to sociology, to law, to psychology, to economics.

Herbert Spencer became the prophetic voice to Darwin’s God. What Spencer did, in his tireless work, was to take the theology of Darwin and make it the Queen of the Sciences. Because of Spencer’s work (and the continuation of it by many who came after Spencer) all of the academic fields would be understood as just so many incarnations and circumstances of the set theology of Darwin’s time + chance + circumstance God.

This is absolutely necessary to understand if we are to understand the times in which we live. Theology today, remains the Queen of the Sciences, even though it is particularly bad theology. All the academic discipline streams flow from and back to their source theology. Understand the source and you will understand the tributaries.

Let us just take one example to drive home our point. Herbert Spencer wrote on Law from a evolutionary view perspective but the ones who took up that mantle and continued to develop it were names like Langdell, Pound, and Holmes.

The evolutionary principles that Harvard Law Deans, Christopher Columbus Langdell, and Roscoe Pound developed for Law and their most famous student Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. implemented as a Supreme Court justice are principles that Spencer had brought to the development of a comprehensive evolutionary world and life view that was based on evolution. These Harvard Law school principles for law were,

1.) There are no divine absolutes in law, and even if there were they would be irrelevant to the modern legal system.

2.) Law is simply man-made. Law is not law because God has made it and the state is seeking to accurately implement it but rather law is law because the state has created it and has the muscle to back it up.

3.) Law evolves as man evolves. Law is not absolute but accommodates itself to the changing times.

4.) Law can evolve because judges guide the evolution of law.

5.) This evolution is set and determined by the written decisions of judges. The study of law then becomes a familiarization with the written decisions of the judges. This is pursued in order to gain a sense of the trajectory of the evolution of the law. In this paradigm the constitution as the constitution is irrelevant. All that matters is becoming familiar with the trajectory of the law.

Now, these same kind of principles that were developed for law had likewise been developed for other academic disciplines with the result that their developed a unified world and life view for the West that was hostile to Christianity.

Here is where the application comes to the fore. Obviously this world and life view based on Darwin’s god and developed by Herbert Spencer and men like Langdell, Pound, Holmes, (Law) Dewey, Kilpatrick, (Education), James, Freud, Jung, (Psychology), Sumner, Ward (Sociology), Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger (Philosophy), Barth, Altizer, Tillich (Theology), Creel, Bernays, and Jones (Social Control) has created a culture that is anti-Christ to the core.

So we are living in a culture that is and has been for several generations based upon a lie. Our institutions are built on and reflect the lie. Our people, having been educated deeply in this lie, partake in this lie. The lie is so close to us as a people that we cannot see it for what it is since we have taken it for the truth for so long now.

What complicates all this is a generation of ministers rising up who embrace Radical Two Kingdom theology which teaches that the Church may not speak to the lie that has created the culture that God’s people are saturated in and with. We are told that it is wrong to seek to reinterpret life according to the canon of God’s word. We are told that the culture which this lie creates is none of the Church’s business to speak to and that we should mind our own business and only speak to a nebulous spiritual realm. We are told that the Theology that was given to crush all pretenders to the name must lie silent like a toothless lion and allow false theologies and false gods shape and control the public square.

It’s difficult to determine whether Herbert Spencer or some contemporary Reformed theologians have been more injurious to the cause of the crown rights of King Jesus.

Such thinking, politely speaking, is just plain stupid. Christian theology that is not allowed into the public square is not Christian theology and may be, in the end, even worse then those theologies that have been unleashed and unchallenged to create pagan culture.