In a previous essay I explored limited government as the fruit of a society rooted in biblical principles, and under what conditions the church might disobey the government. Here I want to turn up the volume on this sentiment and discuss what happens when that State juices up and becomes a big fat cancer of totalitarianism. I would like to explore its motivations, dissect its assumptions and then lay out an argument for why Christianity is the only potential disruptor.
Mention totalitarianism and eyeballs roll. You are one of those guys, those conspiratory types with back page news stories pinned to your garage wall webbed in red yarn, tacked in acute angles. It is an overreaction, an exaggeration, a tactic to demonize your opponents. In the last four years both Right and Left accuse the other of moving toward totalitarianism. Repeatedly ringing this bell has caused a deafness to the word and taken it out of context of history and possibility. Those who use it are dismissed like so many Chicken Littles running around with their heads cut off.
Totalitarianism is, however, a tragic reality. The 20th century was witness to several totalitarian regimes. Not a few are still alive who lived with a boot on their face. These events are in the rear view mirror, but, as the mirror itself warns, they are closer than they appear. Advances in technology have done nothing to decrease the allure or the ability of those wishing to usurp freedoms to do so. Unparallel surveillance capabilities through Big Tech has served up a glut of delicious data for those who have an appetite for power. Postmodernism has ripped the throat from truth. Nanny states provide more of our daily bread. The pieces are all there, though as of yet, unassembled. Totalitarianism may not be reincarnated as it has been in past forms, but like Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” When it does, and even as it does, the only resistance is the well-fed Christian.
I would like to defend the statement Christianity is the only potential disruptor to totalitarianism. Disruptors are devices that get in the way or otherwise incapacitate a target. It is a disruptor because it is not of this world, but it is very much in the world – a pesky combination for worldly rulers drawing up blueprints for a new Babel. I use the word “potential” because of the connotation that a thing could be a disruptor, if it wanted to be. Or it could get drunk and sleep through the championship game.
Totalitarianism
As often happens, groups absorb as their identity the smear of their opponents. This is true of totalitarianism. The word totalitarian was originally a slur thrown by the enemies of Mussolini’s fascists party with the stinking accusation that he wanted to control everything in the country. As far as accusations go, this one was spot on: he really did want to control everything. The name stuck. It stuck so well in fact, Mussolini kept the term, flipped it, and made it sound like the best thing since pane a fette. To use his own words, “everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state.”
Totalitarianism is a form of rule which forces subservience to the state, restricts opposition, and exercises a high degree of control over the public and private life of citizens. We think of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Dark Lord Sauron, and this is true as far as it goes. But it would be a mistake to consign totalitarianism to dictatorships alone. A dictatorship describes the seat of the power (usually a strong charismatic leader or one who bears the Elder Wand) while totalitarianism describes the scope of the power. Totalitarianism does not need a dictatorship to thrive, however, and can metastasize in any form of government, even a democracy. Though totalitarian states may be identical, the common denominator is increasingly coercive control over every facet of life. Totalitarianism is State as god.
Hannah Arendt in her book the Origins of Totalitarianism dives deep into the psychology of a totalitarian state, it’s means and ends. Several factors coalesce to create totalitarianism’s maelstrom of political craziness which it employs to perpetuate itself. It rises from political tension, isolates individuals through the fear of death, hinders community gatherings, spreads propaganda and misinformation, banking on the public willingness to believe lies. Often there is the idea of a “master race” which expunges the undesirables of a nation, justified with the arbitrary righteousness of a strange morality, pursuing a distant utopia. Examples are regrettably too familiar.
Gods are as gods do. When the State is a god, it will act like God, establishing moral codes, punishing sin, requiring worship, offering salvation and provision to all under its wing. Christianity is a disruptor of totalitarianism because they worship the one true God, the only show in town, who just so happens to have already laid out the rules, and has a proclivity to save. To a totalitarian state, Christians are like Legos in a country of Mega Bloks, you can’t build anything with them.
Commandments in Order
All laws are the expressed morality of a state. All morality is an expression of religious belief. All religious beliefs terminate in a god. Gods are not optional. Which god a state has is a choice, whether there is a god is not. If there is a god above the state, then He is God. If there is no God above the State, then the State is god, and gods make the rules. When the State concludes that “above us is only sky”, it helps itself to the crown. Christianity reminds the State that there is a God above and He did not task it with determining the foundation of morality. He went ahead and did that for us in establishing the disposition of mankind through the Great Commandment.
In Matthew 22 a Pharisee asks Jesus what is the greatest commandment. Jesus replies,
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
These two commandments are the foundation of all morality and national laws. If you get these two commandments right, in that order, you have the law and the prophets in the bag. It’s a bundle package. The Christian stands as a witness that it is man’s first duty to love God. By extension, he will love wherever the image of God is found – in his neighbor.
In the wilderness, Satan, having departed from subtlety, goads Jesus to supplant the first commandment. Bringing Jesus to the top of a tall mountain, he showed him the splendor of all the kingdoms of the earth, which would all be given to him if he would bow and worship Satan. We tend to make much of this arrangement offered by Satan: Jesus prostrating before the Prince of Darkness, Satan bathing in the worship, the sky darkening with swift clouds, children crying in the streets. But in reality, Satan could have placed a laying hen in front of Jesus and offered the same deal to the same effect. The point is he wanted to replace God as the object of worship with anything that is not God – any created thing. In fact, he would be quite content if we organized a society around the second commandment first, though there isn’t time to open that bag of cats just now.
So man’s first duty is to worship and love God with all his being which necessarily eliminates the possibility of any other entity filling that place. The first commandment alone stands as an unbreachable wall to totalitarian machinations. If the State imposes law or manners of living which are contrary to loving God, the Christian response is to politely inform the State it is about to be disappointed. The first commandment is the north star that orients our moral compasses to a true north.
Remember Mussolini: “everything is the state, no human or spiritual thing has any value outside the state.” The State cannot accomplish its means if the first affections of the human heart are antithetical to its central power. Christianity disrupts Totalitarianism by defining a boundary line that State sovereignty cannot transgress. The first commandment alone is a levy against totalitarian flood waters. But the second commandment as well stands in direct opposition.
The second greatest command is to love your neighbor as yourself. This means if you see your neighbor lying naked and robbed on the side of the road, you pick him up, tend to his wounds, and put him up in the Comfort Inn til he is back on his feet. It means if the little guy is getting his ribs tenderized by an oaf, you hop in the fight circle and speak peace. And if that doesn’t work, you try to make peace, regardless of the size of the bully. This includes if the bully is the State and it is going through your oppressed brothers pockets in a dark alley, looking for his rent money.
Loving your neighbor means taking up the cause of the oppressed and captive, and this includes when the oppressor and captor is a totalitarian government who intends to, you know, oppress and capture. What undergirds the brazen actions of defending the oppressed from a larger, more powerful State, is Judeo-Chrisitan truth that mankind is made in the image of God, and so to oppress, murder, rob and rape the Image, is to do the same to the Image Maker.
Salvation
The Bible is chock full of stories, songs, and shouts of the salvation of the Lord. He is a provider, protector, and preserver. He saves in multifarious ways, not the least of which is sending his Son to save the world from sin and death. He saves through daily provisions, he rescues from pestilence and leads us by quiet waters.
People who need to be saved cling to their savior. The State pantomimes this salvific effect through communicating to the populace the dangers they need to be saved from. Some of these threats are real, such as economic despair or destructive political ideologies. Other threats are of disunity which could tear it asunder. Some are viruses. There must be a menace which forebodes doom, which the State alone can rescue from if the people would but run under their wing. Totalitarian states have a savior complex. They need to save.
A real life example of this goes way back a month and a half after the resurrection. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles in the form of a tongue of fire, doing a little jig atop apostolic heads. Immediately after, Peter heads out to the town square and starts preaching. Acts 4 recounts one of these sermons culminating in the following two verses:
This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
This is a beautiful sentence: mellifluous in its structure, poignant in its intention…and a straight up taunt. Peter was intentionally sticking it to the Roman dictatorship with his declaration of Jesus as Lord by commandeering this sentence and tossing Caesar out of the driver’s seat.
For about 200 hundred years, beginning in 27 BC with Julius Caesar and ending with Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, the Pax Romana offered protection and peace to provinces which were under Roman control, so long as they submitted to taxation and military presence. When a tribe or kingdom capitulated, a euangelion (“good news” in Greek) announcement would be hung in the town square. It read, “There is no other name under heaven by which you can be saved, save Augustus.” See what Peter did there?
Remember, this Roman declaration of this euangelion had been a common saying for decades at this point. Taken together with the common idea at the time that Caesar was the divine son of god, we have what some would call a territory dispute.
There is only one Savior and it ain’t Caesar. Christianity disrupts totalitarianism in its declaration of a true Savior who is able to save from the deep rot of the soul and free us from the fear of death.
Freedom
A consequence of the first commandant is personal responsibility. We as individuals are accountable for our life choices and to what extent they are in line they make much of God. As Paul says in Romans, “so each one of us will give an account of himself to God.” To do this we must have the liberty to make choices for which we can be held accountable. We cannot be held accountable for things which we have no control over such as the color of our skin or height. Christianity affirms this freedom of mankind to pursue what life seems best to him, to pursue virtue, excellence and the good life.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Pursuit of Happiness is a phrase which has been stuffed full of unicorn colors, butterfly sneezes and the sweet baby dreams, and to us means the freedom to pursue whatever kind of life keeps a grin on our faces, whether that is from nefarious, perverted or honorable means. You be you; whatever makes you happy. This is not the intention of the phrase.
Happiness was Jefferson’s translation of the greek word eudaimonia which was a term tossed around in ancient Greece meaning the purpose of life itself. Eudaimonia is living a good life which is rich with virtue, excellence and integrity. It is achieving the highest means of the human spirit through pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty, and the enjoyment of the dividends flowing from a life well lived. The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of a life bound by and banks of God’s commandments, pounding with the flow from the spring of all the creative forces of the Godhead which he poured into mankind. This freedom is like the direction of a river flowing inexorably towards the sea.
Totalitarian states dam this flow and divert the water to flood their own fields. Underlying the totalitarian state assumption is that man is made for the purpose of being governed and can therefore be harnessed to serve its own purpose.
The difference here is an ontological one. Christianity frees men to pursue that which is good, that which is in the direction of the first commandment which will bless the earth and mankind. Christianity honors human dignity in this way by affirming that our choices really matter. The proof that they matter is that we will be held accountable for them. Christianity disrupts this dam in the way high volume rivers will always triumph over concrete and steel without constant and meddlesome interference with the natural order of nature. Here the fundamental mistake is the faulty assumptions of human purpose, direction and the subsequent mismanagement of the human spirit.
Truth and Hope
If you listen to any conservative podcast you will hear much airtime spent pointing out the double standards of the Left. Such shifting standards are so apparent you would think at some point the clear contradiction would be called out by the general population demanding accountability. But the truth is there isn’t a double standard. Standards are objective boundaries for certain actions which stand apart from everyone, even the one making the standard. When this happens the entity making the standard is held accountable to it just like everyone else. In civil times, a lawmaker can be arrested for breaking the law he sponsored the week before, to the irony of all.
The reason totalitarian political parties seem to set a standard one day, which the next day is changed, is because they are the standard. There is no outside objective standard which they hold themselves up to, but a whimsical, arbitrary standard which emanates from within.
This fits. If totalitarianism is State as god then they will act like God, but in a funhouse mirror sort of way. Christian morality is a standard based on the immutable nature and character of God. Man’s obedience to God – how to honor God, what it means to love, how we ought to treat others – is not a standard which stands separate from God, to which He also holds Himself accountable. He is the standard. God is love and the standard of how to love God and neighbor emanates from his nature. This standard doesn’t change because God doesn’t change. Love is what it is because that is the nature of God. He cannot not love.
In a similar way, when the State schooches back onto the White Throne, their standard doesn’t stand separate from them, to which they hold themselves and others accountable. They are the standard; the standard emanating from whatever desire washed up on the shore that morning. In a way this makes it real easy for the populace: the only thing they have to remember is to do what the State says. However, since they are corruptible, with changing desires and machinations, the standards which are applied on others change arbitrarily.
That this standard is untrue is obvious. However, since the laws of reason still apply, if the fickle contradictions are pointed out, the State needs to still appear monolithic; it needs to sew the old cloth onto the new garment, and for that they need a mouthpiece: the media.
Mainstream media is used by totalitarian states to bring about conformity through the use of disinformation and propaganda. This is true of every totalitarian regime in history. The purpose of propaganda is not to inform, educate, or sloganeer for a particular viewpoint; it does not appeal to the mind or even the heart; it cares nothing for reason. It is meant to be the surround sound voice of a state to bend the mind and will to acquiescence.
Here is a quote from Hannah Arendt. It speaks for itself.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
When constant lies and glut of information make truth irrelevant, and every motivation is reduced to the mere self interests of a certain party, cynicism follows. What truth can exist when history is daily remade? And what hope can grow in soil turned every morning?
Against this ethereal flux, Christianity stands on unalterable and eternal truth and lays bare the motivations of the heart. God is the immutable standard which emanates from his perfect, eternal, triune relationship. Jesus is the way the truth and the life and, as Hebrews tells us, God cannot lie. This is when the house built on the rock is a refuge to the cynical and a terror to those who count on the destabilization of reality with lies and misinformation. Christianity is a solid object in a world of ghosts.
Hope is a natural consequence of this truth. Where cynicism breeds despair, truth brings expectation of future certainties held fast by the Word of God. There really is such a thing as evil and good and God tells us which is which. We have a true system of value, we are dealing with real gold, not fiat currency which is indefinitely changing. The God of history is at work even in the darkest of times to bring about a glorious future where his knowledge covers the earth as waters cover the sea. This will happen and it will happen in and through the physical world that we occupy. This new Babel will end with dispersion and confusion, as all Babels do. As opposed to cynicism dropping eyes to the ground and herding people to conformity, truth is the solid rock under the feet, and hope is a path, straight and narrow, into a future God has already fashioned.
Resurrection
Fear of death makes us slaves to whomever threatens to take our lives. Knuckles whiten gripping onto life with a doggedness we couldn’t justify if asked. Thus consciousness of our precarious existence makes us prisoners in this wide world, and those who hold the power of life and death in twitching hands our masters.
No one has better described this vascillaton than the Bard himself in Hamlet. This same fear Hamlet contests with as he questions “to be or not to be?” Should he off himself and end the pain? But what of the “undiscovered country” that no one has returned from? The fear of the unknown makes us “bear those ills we have than fly to others we know not of”, clinging even to a caged life to avoid its coils, even if that life is one of subjugation.
Christianity boasts a Champion who has come back from that country and was the first fruits of a whole harvest of resurrected persons. But resurrection doesn’t only look far off into an eternal heaven. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was the launching of the kingdom of God here on earth. It is “Thy kingdom come” having come. Through the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit the Christian rejoices in suffering and considers it all joy when trials are heaped on our heads. It is hard to control people with the threat of death who have no fear of it.
Christian persecution in the Roman empire testifies the threat of death is useless to those whose hope is based on the fact of death. What effect did Roman persecution have on the first century Church? It seeded like dandelion fluff. The church blossomed in blood meal soil. For the Christian, death is not a crouching tiger preditorizing him through life. It is a kitten curled up on his lap, perhaps a spot of sunshine slipping in through the window, nesting in its tawny fur.
Lazarus didn’t respond well to threats. After enjoying a four day nap, and raised from the dead by Jesus, the prospect of dying again held no sway. When you know you will not stay dead, death isn’t terrifying. However, If all there is are the threads of this short life, you will do anything to keep it, even if it means being a plaything of totali-toddlers.
Hebrews 2, for the win:
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.
All fear is the fear of death in its various forms. Not all death is physical. This is evident enough from Genesis when Adam and Eve, warned of death for disobedience, did not die right away. But death slinked in and infected their relationship with each other, their children, the very ground. When we fear the loss of social status or good standing with our community, this is the fear of death.
For the Christian, persecution, a form of death, is baked into the cake. Indeed, we are told ahead of time we will suffer in such ways if we follow Christ, by none other than the Lord himself:
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Persecution is on the syllabus for Christians. And when we suffer for Christ’s sake, bearing it patiently, all it is doing is racking up treasures in heaven that will be lavished on us when we are inevitably resurrected in our brand spankin’ new bodies. The Christian’s life is hidden with Christ in God, as Paul reminds us,
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God
When your life is hidden with such a terrible power, inside a terrible power, who can make something out of nothing and calls things which are not as though they were, you tend to not care if HR calls you into the office or Zuck cancels your account.
And so the chains of death with which earthly rulers bind us to bake the bricks of Babel are broken by the power of a resurrected life. For resurrection life is not something which swings low to carry us home when we die, but the life of the Holy Spirit which lives within us the moment of our new birth. Thus the hope and reality of resurrection is a threat to the State because it renders the Christian unbindable with the threat of death.
Potential
As I mentioned above, Christianity is a potential disruptor. Naturally, Christianity is antithetical to a totalitarian state. But without solid leadership, without affections fixed on Christ , without stout hearts and sober minds, it is a pushover. If the church has waxed fat and become timid it will not love God first; if the church has itching ears it will not repent of its guilt; if it squats comfortably in its nest it will be unaware of its need for a savior; if it is full of candy lies it will not crave the meat and milk of truth; if it is refuses to die it cannot experience resurrection life. Then it is no disruptor at all, but an adorable little brother that does whatever mainstream culture is doing, but 5 months later, in a less cool way. Maybe pasting a Bible verse onto it.
How shall we then live?
God ordained before the world began that you would live in America in the 21st century. You are here. How ought we to conduct ourselves in a way that is worthy of our calling?
Pray. Do not fight with weapons of the flesh. It is no coincidence that where the gospel is growing fastest is where the saints are praying the most. Answer me truly, which do you spend more time on each day, praying or having a bowel movement? For the average American Christian these two numbers are neck and neck with the bowel movements barely eeking out the gold.
Or put it another way, if you were Frodo and Sam on a quest to destroy the One Ring and save Middle Earth, would you travel towards Mount Doom for five minutes a day, then stop and play in the creek until the five minute trek tomorrow? No, you press on each day as far as your little hobbit feet can carry you because you desperately want to realize the goal of your mission.There are powers at work beyond our comprehension.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Pray for revival, for repentance, wisdom. Pray for our leaders. Pray for mercy for them. Pray that God would make those who dig pits for the righteous to fall in themselves. If we are not praying, not only will we lose America, we will lose ourselves, our churches and our children.
Read. Take this time to be a student of history. Be curious about stuff. Whatever you are curious about, someone has written a book on it. “Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it”, as Santayana said. But there is a deeper reason than mere knowledge. Can you defend, for example, that the destiny of mankind is liberty? Why? It is not enough to say someone at some point wrote a book about. Understand the development of limited government, why it is better, how it came about. Think what it means to obey God rather than man. Use this time to understand government and church interaction and how God set it up. Soak in truth, know the real and you know the counterfeit. Be as wise as serpents but innocent as doves; be bilingual in parseltongue, but do not utter it.
Stop ceding territory. This point deserves an essay in itself. We have become obsessed with an eschatology where the world falls apart and the forces of darkness continue to encroach and oppress until the Lord returns from the clouds. The forces of evil will spread like cockroaches over the earth and usher in the eschaton -one currency, one world government, raptured Christians, cats and dogs living together, chaos and destruction, and a charismatic antichrist with a rubber stamp, tagging foreheads. I’m so thankful God gave us Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins as modern day Virgils to guide us out of an apocalyptic purgatory for those Left Behind!
Where does the idea come from that these things must happen for the Lord to return? When we see government overreach or the mildest persecution of the Chrisitan faith we immediately assume, “This is what Revelation spoke about! We are living in the end times!” Can we justify this in the Bible? What if it isn’t what God intends? What if we have misread and the reality is the church is meant to cover the earth with mossy green life and then the Lord will return? We pray “thy kingdom come” but sure as hell looks like we are planning on “thy kingdom go”. In American evangelical worldview, we plan on losing. When you are convinced the other side wins in the end, you have zero reason to fight for what is good and right and beautiful. We would certainly feel foolish for all the ground we ceded due to a faulty view of the eschaton.
What if the church is still in its infancy?
Be jealous. Beware those who castigate jealousy for personal liberty as selfish. They are not your friend. Those not jealous for their own liberty will not be jealous for the liberty of their neighbor, and to be jealous for your neighbors liberty is to love him. It is self-sacrifice to be jealous for your own liberties, because that sacrifice is for your neighbor as well. When a nation of individuals ceases to be jealous for their own individual liberties, they cease to love their neighbor.
For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God
Being jealous for those things which are yours is good. This takes wisdom, of course, because when we are jealous for those things which aren’t, jealousy burns us to the ground, makes us rash. But without jealousy for your neighbors freedom, we will not fight to save him from oppression.
Guilt free living. Guilt is a cattle prod. It is meant to move a person in the direction of repentance, at which point the prodding is no longer needed. Naturally it has a short half-life. But if the means to repent can be suspended indefinitely, guilt can become a means of control.
Ask any recovering Catholic – they know the power of guilt to control. If your mom can sink those hooks into your flesh about how you never visit her anymore, guess where you are spending Thanksgiving? And does that visit expunge your guilt? Not a bit of it. Because if there is no means of forgiveness, there can be no repentance, and if there is no repentance, guilt remains.
When a totalitarian culture can convince a populace of its inherent guilt, this acts as an Eternal Cattle Prod to keep the population lowing and moving in their desired direction. What about a society that is beat over the head with guilt of racism, real or perceived, that is kept from repentance and forgiveness of a history of slavery, that is daily reminded of the foul morals of it’s founding, that is given unmitigated access to pornography? Think they might have some guilt? Not a little. Show me a society ashamed of itself and I will show you a society that willingly walks into the jail cell.
The glory of the Chrisitian message is that we take guilt very seriously and deal with it through repentance to God and those we sinned against. Our conscience is cleansed. Boldness follows. Here is the author of Hebrews:
For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
Clean consciences are slick watermelon seeds; you can’t seem to get them between thumb and finger. This freedom of conscience, knowing you stand in the right relationship with God and fellow man means you are uncontrollable by means of guilt. It gives you staying power.
Feast. Enjoy the gifts of God with thanksgiving. Laugh. Enjoy God. Rejoice in the spiritual synergy of being with other Christians. Recount His goodness to your kids. Maximize your joy in this life. Pursue those things which are truly beautiful. God has left hyperlinks all over creation which link to his homepage. Read poetry, write bad poetry, be creative in whatever way you can. You can dance if you want to.
Die. Because at this time in America we have no real fear of being killed for our faith, it is important to recognize there are more ways to be killed than physically. Those unwilling to lose social status or reputation stand at risk of death of self. Being “cancelled” from social media or fired from your job is a form of death. This is a kind of social dismemberment which occurs publicly, virtually, and castigates you from the community of peers because of certain beliefs. Examples of this are too many to count, and deadly for those who have placed their identity squarely in the uncalloused hands of those who hold the virtual gavel. We fear being labeled as a hater, a homophobe, misogynistic, racist – such are the bullets in the gun pressed to the temple of our identities.
But there is no danger of any meaningful death here; nothing is dying that didn’t need a good killing off anyway. Following Jesus is a training regimen for learning how to die to yourself so there is nothing left to kill when the State comes to finish you off.
Taking up your cross daily looks suspiciously like an “X marks the spot” to those whose worldview is tilted. Trouble will find you. Persecution will come. Know where your true identity comes from and who you are. Whatever dead flesh we use to create our identity, there the crows will gather.
Conclusion
Totalitarianism is no bueno. It seeks to control through insertion of, guilt, and fear of death. The changing standards are a reflection of the schizophrenic nature that sees itself as the standard and therefore is always right. Messages are contradictory, truth is awash in a sea of irrelevance, and with it, hope. Totalitarianism cannot sustain a society. It is a bronzed tit, cold, hard, unable to nourish souls. God cannot be mocked. That is what totalitarianism is – the mocking of God at the State level. It will reap what it sows and the Christian helpfully brings this to mind.
Christianity is not an annoyance to totalitarianism. It is not a banana peel to slip it up. It is not a competitor. Not even an enemy. It is a poison. A disruptor. Christianity is the only potential disruptor because it has unalterable commands which place God first and neighbor second and will defend that order in the face of death. God himself, unchanging and true, is the standard for truth which means the meekest can stand before Caesar and say with clout that he has spilled the banks of his job description. Salvation comes through Christ alone. Lastly, should it come to coercion under penalty of death, physical or otherwise, his new and better life comes by means of death and his life is hidden with Christ in God.
As secular totalitarianism rears its ugly head in our country, we need to be people of prayer who are jealous and zealous to love God first and neighbor second. Being students of the Bible and history we can be thoughtful and well founded on our convictions as we feast and rejoice in this life God has given to us. As we pray and work to make “Thy kingdom come” America can repent and be revived and the knowledge of the Lord will cover the amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea.
Thought Butter 