Tag Archives: evil

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Daily Broadside | Speak Up and Call Evil What It Is

Yesterday I wrote that there seems to be a gathering consensus that now is the time to speak up about the cultural revolution that we’re experiencing in the U.S., and that by “speaking up,” I mean getting educated and not being shy to educate others or to take a stand contrary to the woke orthodoxy that currently reigns as virtue in our country.

One of the authors and speakers I follow is Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. I’m going to mash together what he wrote yesterday with a sprinkle of thoughts from Tucker Carlson and Naomi Wolf. First, here’s some of what Wilson said in his blog post:

All societies are grounded in the will of their God or gods, no exceptions. And when a society (like ours) pretends to be exempt from this iron law, the thing that results is massive amounts of confusion. In our case, the time of that confusion was lengthened and drawn out because we had an enormous amount of that moral capital. The prodigal son was truly disobedient, but he also had a really big inheritance to squander. It took him a while.

But our confusion about who is the god of the system does not mean that the god of the system is confused about it. We might think that we are all being decent bipedal carbon units in our Judeo/Christian faith tradition, when we are actually in the process of being enslaved to the service of Mammon. But our confusion is not shared by Mammon. Mammon knows all about it. Mammon knows the game.

So with that being the case, why am I being upbeat about our hot mess of a culture? The thing that has happened is this. Our situation has grown dire enough that when I now say it is Christ or chaos, an ordinary Christian can look at that and know exactly what I am talking about. Twenty-five years ago, this stark and very binary choice would have been very hard to explain to rank-and-file Christians—but now many of them are out looking for an explanation, and when someone gives it to them, they grasp it in under a minute.

This is an encouraging observation. He’s saying that people — and, in particular, Christian people — are beginning to notice that something is very wrong. And not only are they noticing that something is wrong, they are noticing that it is so wrong, so dire, that there’s really only two ways to go from here: continue into the chaos, or reverse course by throwing up roadblocks and barriers to any further progress down that road by intentionally standing on, and for, Christ.

In other words, Wilson says, we’re starting to pay attention.

But you know who else is paying attention and wondering what in the world is going on? Opinion leaders and influencers outside of the Christian faith. Neither Tucker Carlson nor Naomi Wolf would necessarily be expected to describe what is happening in distinctly Christian terms, but that is what has happened.

Carlson, by his own admission, is Episcopalian, “the shallowest faith tradition that’s ever been invented.” Yet, listen to what he says during his speech at the Heritage Foundation, the Friday night before his show was cancelled by Fox News.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice [abortion]? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

That seems like a courageous act to me. In a culture where “tolerance” and “diversity” and “inclusion” are the highest values, making a moral judgement about someone else’s behavior is tantamount to a declaration of war. It’s deeply offensive to a society that is steeped in moral relativism. Carlson’s observation comes out of a conservative political viewpoint with at least the trappings of a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, has been, for most of her political life, a hard-left feminist of Jewish extraction, who considered her faith unimportant and, anyway, deeply personal. But during the Chinese Lung Pox hysteria, she did her research and began to discover that there was something much bigger and darker going on. Here’s what she wrote more than a year ago:

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.

I have seen bad politics all of my life and this drama unfolding around us goes beyond bad politics, which is silly and manageable and not that scary. This — this is scary, metaphysically scary. In contrast to hapless human mismanagement, this darkness has the tinge of the pure, elemental evil that underlay and gave such hideous beauty to the theatrics of Nazism; it is the same nasty glamour that surrounds Leni Riefenstahl films.

In short, I don’t think humans are smart or powerful enough to have come up with this horror all alone.

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence.

And that is a huge leap for me to take, as a classical Liberal writer in a postwar world, — to say these things out loud.

Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters — at least not in public. We are supposed to be shy about referencing God Himself, and are certainly are not supposed to talk about evil or the forces of darkness.

Here are two secular personalities who have both come to the conclusion that our society is so broken, so twisted, so upside-down, that they’re forced to conclude that there is a force at work that transcends what we can see, and they label it “evil,” a theological term associated with, at minimum, the Jewish and Christian faiths. What I find so remarkable is that they’re so awestruck by the sinister nature of what we’re experiencing that they’re forced to use a theological term that many in the Christian faith themselves aren’t willing to utter for fear of being labeled a nutter.

And that brings me back to Wilson’s commentary. It’s great that believers are waking up to the ugly reality of our situation, but we need to be willing to say so. We also need to not only recognize that what we’re seeing is evil; we need to articulate that it is so. Christians, of all people, have the theological language, history and book to back up our claims.

The other thing that both Wolf and Carlson admit to is that the power of evil is so overwhelming that they both suggest that prayer is essential. From the same linked sources:

Carlson: “[M]aybe we should all take just 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I’m serious. Why not? And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist, I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian, the Samaritans of our time. I’m coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I’m literally an Episcopalian. And even I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will.

Wolf: “I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.”

If secular types like Wolf and Carlson are willing to call evil, evil, and to call on God for help in resisting it, shouldn’t we be willing and ready to do the same?

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Daily Broadside | The Problem of Evil Is One of Belief

Daily Verse | Job 24:13
“There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths.”

Thursday’s Reading: Job 25-28

Thursday and yesterday I wrote that we are living in evil times. This is, of course, a biblical concept.

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
— Ephesians 5:15-16

What’s astounding to me is that even those whom we would consider coming at life from a secular perspective (i.e. following Jesus or seeking what God wants are not priorities) are seeing the evil and, more than that, sounding the alarm. As I mentioned, Dr. Naomi Wolf is on some kind of a spiritual journey, and it’s because she has no categories in which to explain what she sees happening in society.

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.

What does it say when the collective behavior of a society is so abhorrent, so unimaginable—so wicked—that someone who wasn’t taking God seriously is suddenly forced to reconsider their position and recategorize what they’re seeing in biblically moral terms?

And she’s not the only one writing about evil. Here’s noted columnist Daniel Greenfield in a piece called, “Uvalde and the Problem of Evil.”

What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Guns.

19 years ago, a middle-aged unemployed taxi driver carrying two milk cartons full of gasoline walked onto a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.

That was not a milk carton problem. Nor was it a gasoline problem.

6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a Bastille Day event in Nice, France killing 86 and wounding over 400 other people. Body parts were being pried out of his wheel wells.

That was not a truck problem.

Across the long stretch of human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, in often cruder and far more brutal ways. Back then we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of smithing, but the problem of evil.

The problem with evil is that it requires us to believe in good.

Modern people are unwilling to believe in G-d, and so they believe instead in government. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we only give it the power.

The trouble is that while people may not believe in evil, evil very much believes in them.

Another favorite essayist is Michael Walsh. He’s written about the moral collapse before in (dense) books such as The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and The Fiery Angel. (Be sure to set aside plenty of time to absorb his perspective.) He also writes at the popular level in opinion columns at The Pipeline. Here’s some of what he wrote in his most recent column, which focuses on the lack of masculinity in our society.

No, the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in our guns but in ourselves, and specifically in our men. For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed “toxic” by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.

Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not “baby daddies,” to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn’t exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an “X” for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons …

… No, the problem isn’t “gun violence,” it’s the enforced emasculation of teenage American males via liberalism, feminism, academia, psychiatry, pharmacology, and the media, which all too often explodes in inchoate rage. Innate female impulses and values are critical to civilizational formation, but they are antithetical to civilizational preservation, prizing collectivism over individuality, shared instead of personal responsibility, and constant, generally irrational fears for physical and emotional safety. (“Safety” on line? Twitter can instantly “suspend” you permanently and Facebook can send you to Sugarmountain Prison on the spot for unspecified “harassment,” but the Uvalde shooter can yap on social media about his desire to assault a school and nothing happens to him, algorithmically speaking.) There has never been a successful matriarchy in Western history and there never will be. Neither sex would or should want it. And as for the 19th Amendment and its effect on American history, don’t get me started…

… [O]ur forefathers would have dubbed such behavior as “evil,” which is what the shootings in Texas and in Buffalo—and the weekly carnage in places like Chicago—are. Please don’t “judge” him, said the Texas shooter’s mom, “he had his reasons.” No real man cares what his “reasons” were. Indeed, the sooner we get the shrinks out of the criminal justice system entirely, and replace them with morality, the more justice we’re going to get for criminals. Some people are just born to be bad and no amount of shrinking is going to help them; it only excuses them.

All of this reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote about relativism and “men without chests.”

In his book, The Abolition of Man, Lewis was prophetic in pointing out that relativism—the idea that there are no absolute truths—would lead to the decay of morality and a lack of virtue within society. Without a belief in and the teaching of universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with intelligent men who behave like animals or as Lewis puts it, “Men without Chests.” Read slowly to follow Lewis’s apologetic:

As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests …

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

What he’s saying here is that we can’t criticize and destroy our moral foundations and then turn around and expect men and women of integrity, dignity and honor.

When you lose any sense of moral structure, here’s where it leads:

Not only does the assailant not have a “chest,” but neither do any of the men on the train. Instead of intervening on behalf of the terrified woman, who whimpers “help me,” they whip out their phones and … take videos of the assault.

That situation infuriates me. Not because I’m a hero, but because none of them were. It was so unjust, so repugnant, so offensive to civil society.

Where are the men?

Back to Daniel Greenfield:

Evil is a human void. It’s the egotistical emptiness that remains in the absence of good. To defeat it, we would have to conceive of good. We would have to retell the stories of the mass shootings, of crime in general, as a struggle between good and evil. Not all that long ago, we had a society capable of telling that story. These days we are more likely to celebrate evil.

The Left believes that government is god and it conceives of evil as disobedience to government. The gun control debate reduces evil to the NRA and anyone who won’t obey and hand over their guns. “Do you want more kids to die?” the gun controllers demand.

But good and evil don’t come from a gun. Nor do they come from the government.

The reduction of individual choices to mechanical abstractions, shootings to guns, individual acts to society, is the mark of elites who want to rule the world, yet can’t understand people.

There’s no formula more likely to convince people that their acts have no value, their lives no purpose, and that whatever they do doesn’t matter in any larger sense. And so evil is born.

Here’s the truth: evil is a reality.

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:13-15)

There is evil in the world, and people are beginning to discover that truth. But as Christ-followers, we’ve known that truth for a long time, even as it’s gone out of fashion.

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Daily Broadside | Calling Evil “Evil” in a World Where Truth is Relative

Daily Verse | 1 Kings 18:21
“How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

Monday’s Reading: 1 Kings 20-22

Monday and the start of a new week. But, it’s not just any week—it’s Holy Week. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the start of Jesus’ final week as his meeting with the cross narrowed from three years to seven days. It was out of obedience to his Father’s will that he moved inexorably toward his death.

“I will not speak with you much longer, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold on me, but the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me.”

John 14:30-31

I was inspired by something my pastor said yesterday prior to the message. Without getting detailed at all, he simply drew attention to the world in which our children are growing up, and said something along the lines of, “Our children are under attack. It is evil, and it is exactly what the enemy would do.”

What he was likely referring to is what I wrote about here last week. The gatekeepers at our public schools have allowed an infestation of disturbed, biologically-confused men and women to influence our children at the very youngest and innocent of ages right through college. Our children are facing an onslaught of intentional corruption that they cannot protect themselves from.

It is, in a word, indoctrination.

It is, in another word, evil.

That word, “evil,” was what caught my attention when my pastor said it. I read a lot of news, blogs and other types of reporting. I can say, without exaggeration, that in my reading about the educational and entertainment institutions that groom children towards sexual confusion, only one of them has included the word “evil.”

I’m not saying that no one else has used it but, in my reading, I’ve only come across it once. And that particular source isn’t primarily religious but does respect the Christian faith.

We don’t use or see the word “evil” in news, blogs or in-depth reports. Nor do you hear it in everyday conversation unless you’re among like-minded people or in a church, like I was yesterday. And even there it can sometimes feel extreme.

The reason, at least from my perspective, is because our culture is no longer “Christian” in nature, but secular. The trappings of our Christian heritage still linger—for instance, you can find a bas relief portrait of Moses above the door directly opposite the speaker’s rostrum in the House Chamber—but they only function as artifacts emptied of their meaning, curious historical tokens rather than the sober reminders of a greater Law and Lawgiver that transcend the humanistic drivel that passes for law today.

We also live in a time when calling something “evil” is to make a moral judgment, and that is the one thing that you cannot do in a secular society—especially when that society is based on individual truth and the virtue of tolerance is paramount, as long as you tolerate the right things.

It is here that the Church must object. Because the church is not a building but people, it is individual believers who must object. Not only must they object to the lie that truth is relative, but they must call evil what it is when they see it.

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter.

—Isaiah 5:20

Aren’t those who teach children to question their sexuality calling evil good? Aren’t those who claim to be protecting children from their parents calling good evil? Aren’t they putting darkness for light and light for darkness? Aren’t they putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter?

And where is the Church in all this? The Church, I’m afraid, is timid. It is afraid to call this monstrosity what it is: vile, heinous, wicked, foul, cruel and yes, evil. The Church needs to reclaim its prophetic voice that proclaims, “This is what the Lord says.”

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you will surely die,’ and you do not speak out to dissuade him from his ways, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man to turn from his ways and he does not do so, he will die for his sin, but you will have saved yourself.”

—Ezekiel 33:7-9

Unfortunately, the Church as a whole, with notable exceptions, is failing in its mission to call people to repentance here in the United States. We stand on the wall, similar to Ezekiel, watching the wicked, but not warning them that they will die for their sin because we are afraid: afraid of being different, afraid of being ridiculed, afraid of being rejected, afraid of being hated.

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own.” (Jesus, quoted in John 15:18-19)

I also think the Church has absorbed a lot more of the secular culture than the other way around.

I don’t often connect the Daily Verse at the top of the Broadside to what I write about each day, although there have been some opportunities that I’ve let go by. Today is different. The prophet Elijah confronts the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (a mountain I’ve stood on) and says to the people of Israel, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

Elijah then proves that the Lord is God in a contest with the prophets of Baal (see 1 Kings 18:16-40).

I think something similar has to be said to the Church. If the Lord is God, follow him; but if the secular culture is God, follow it. Otherwise, God will expel you from himself like he threatened to do with the church in Laodicea:

“Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:16)

This is not a dainty little spritz into the sink. The word translated “spit” means “to vomit forth.” It’s a forceful ejection. In the biblical context, it figuratively means to reject with extreme disgust.

Be one or the other. If the Lord is God, follow him—and that means to be unafraid of standing for the truth, even when it means calling evil something that is evil.