One of the men I read pretty regularly is Doug Wilson who blogs at Blog & Mablog. He had a post late in March that I wanted to circle back to because he has a way incisively getting to the point about what is going on in our culture from a (Reformed) Christian point of view.
The post, titled That Acrid Taste of Damnation, looks at what is happening across the country and says that it’s no longer about politics, but about wickedness. Let me quote one full section for you, but I encourage you to go read the the whole thing.
America’s Inchoate and Disintegrating Soul
This is what damnation tastes like. It is not the full damnation itself, but rather just one drop from the bottle, applied to the tip of the tongue. That acrid taste seems like it could never go away, and yet there is a full bottle of it left. There will always be a full bottle left.
It tastes like spitting loss, biting regret, venomous hatred, curdled resentment, dishonest blame shifting, and devouring lust, and all of it curved back on itself. To use Augustine’s phrase—incurvatus in se—it is like a snake biting its tail. Actually, it is not like a snake biting its tail; it is a snake biting its tail.
Instead of the soul turned outward toward God, the twisted soul bends back in upon itself. The idea is to believe in oneself, to reach deep down within one’s own heart, and there to discover a treasury of infinite riches. So goes the lie. But what we have discovered instead is that we have become a vacuous people with hollow souls, empty minds, and grasping hands.
Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands. They are in tatters, and pieces are all over the floor. When we try to pick up one piece, we drop other pieces, and all of them continue to tear and come apart. Not only so, but just as we buy our jeans pre-ripped these days, so also we try to treat our souls the same way—we try to introduce the artificial destruction early on. Christian parents send their fresh little girls off to a government school so that some bureaucratic flunky can start grooming her into taking hormone blockers, and then cutting off her breasts.
If you are reading this, and you are one of those who has been surgically torn apart by such lies, and you are still miserable, that misery has to do with your relationship to the God you are still rejecting. Your misery has nothing to do with the fact that some people in the red states disapprove of what you have done. They cut off your breasts in San Francisco, and you are not spiritually empty because somebody in Tulsa disapproves. You feel spiritually empty because you are spiritually empty, and Oklahoma has little or nothing to do with it. Not only so, but the surgeon who did this awful thing to you is spiritually empty as well, and the medical profession certified him is as hollow as a jug. Looking to them for answers is like drinking from the dry and broken cisterns of ancient Israel, the ones that were dry in Jeremiah’s day.
“Thinking ourselves to be urbane sophisticates, cosmopolitan, savvy in the ways of the world, we have discovered instead that the human souls that we once had are coming apart in our hands.” I can summarize this whole sentence into one word when it comes to what I’ve been describing so often in my observations and critique of the powers-that-be: soulless.
As in callous, heartless, cold, calculating, and cruel.
Name me any politician on the Left these days, and I think “soulless.” There are some on the Right, too, but they’re a minority. Whichever side of the aisle they are on, they don’t care about fairness, lawfulness, truth or those they harm with their insane policies. They care only about themselves and their power.
No one is really “soulless.” We all have a soul. But our souls are sick and unresponsive to what is right and good. So what is the solution?
When you are mired in sin, as America currently is, there is no option other than repentance. That repentance does not extricate us from the bog we have created, but it is the one thing required of us by the only One who can extricate us. The twin summons of the gospel consists of these two imperatives—repent and believe.
When I’ve said that there is only one way back from the coming confrontation, I’m wrong. One is to strenuously object; the other is to repent and believe. Where I am sure to ruffle some feathers is when I say that perhaps it will take both repenting and believing, and strenuously objecting.
The best case scenario is that we and our countrymen (and those living here illegally) come to their senses and repent before it’s too late. We must pray that the Spirit of God does that work.