THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES: AN OVERVIEW IN SEVEN PARTS

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen-year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the late 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

What follows is an outline in seven parts for an overview of the battle mentioned in the title above. I plan to post the first part, “The Administrative State,” on July 4th, commemorating The Declaration of Independence, and thus ringing our founders’s own clarion call against all such states. And then I will post a new part about once a week into the month of August. My sense is that many of us are in need of clarification about the many issues that beset our country at this time in our history, particularly as we approach the presidential election in November. This is my attempt to contribute to such clarification. I know there are those on the opposite side of this battle who will regard my views as misguided (to put it mildly) as I already regard many of their views. Having the perspective set forth in one place, however, with many details included, may help both sides, and those in the middle (or on the outside) to see more clearly all that is at stake in the outcome. That is, at any rate, my hope.   

1. The Administrative State. A brief review of the history of the administrative state from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden, 1900-2024.

2. The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden. An overview of how the Biden state has expanded its power, based on the analysis of Thomas Sowell in his book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy.

3. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. What it would mean to recover our cultural and constitutional heritage based on the principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (AACT) as shown in Yoram Hazony’s book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery.  

4. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (continued).

5. A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History. An assessment of the seriousness of our current cultural calamity based on a comparison with Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, as shown in Eric Metaxas’s Letter to the American Church.

6. The Way of Faith. Reflections on the recovery of the AACT by means of three biblical principles of faith that will help us: a) restore the religious foundations of our culture, b) correct course both in the church and in the state, and c) avoid the disaster of the authoritarian state into which we are presently careening.

7. The Way of Faith (continued).

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