Craig Gallaway is an artist (watercolorist, musician, writer) and a theologian (Christian). He was educated at The University of Texas at Arlington (B.F.A. in painting), Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. (M.C.S. in interdisciplianry studies), and Emory University (Ph.D. in constructive theology). He has worked professionally as an artist, musician, pastor, publisher, and professor. In each case he has explored a life-long interest in the relation between faith and the arts.
The following is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis’s novel, The Great Divorce.[1] Toward the end of his story, Lewis (the narrator) is in conversation with his long-deceased mentor, the Scottish writer, George MacDonald. As they walk together, Lewis asks MacDonald about the life to come and why, for example, various kinds of people either are or are not allowed to enter its blessings. At one point, Lewis sees a light reflecting on the undersides of some leaves, and wonders if there is a river nearby. In this way he comes to meet a very great lady. I offer this excerpt in honor of my wife, Deborah, mother of our children, and in memory of my mother, Sally Gallaway, on this Mother’s Day 2025. The excerpt begins below with Lewis’s description of his conversation with MacDonald.
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The reason I asked if there were another river was this. All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light; and on earth I knew nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the reflected lights cast upward by moving water. A few moments later I realized my mistake. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the light came from the persons who composed it.
First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers—soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders.[2] Then, on the left and right at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honor all this was being done.
“Is it? . . . Is it?” I whispered to my guide.
“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”
“She seems to be . . . well, a person of particular importance?”
“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”
“And who are these gigantic people . . . look! They’re like emeralds, who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?”
“Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”
“And who are all these young men and women on each side?”
“They are her sons and daughters.”
“She must have had a very large family, Sir.”
“Every young man or boy that met her became her son—even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”
“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”
“No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more.”
“And how . . . but hello! What are all these animals? A cat—two cats—dozens of cats. And all those dogs . . . why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”
“They are her beasts.”
“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”
“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”
I looked at my teacher in amazement.
“Yes,” he said, “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (MacMillan: New York, 1946) Chapter 12, page 106 ff.
[2] In Lewis’s imagined intermediate state, prior to the new heavens and the new earth of Revelation 21, even the heavenly world of paradise is more real and solid than the world of the fallen earth.
All Hallows Eve, watercolor, by Craig Gallaway, copyright 2004 by Gallaway Art.
For several years Deb and I have been learning to celebrate Halloween in a specifically biblical and Christian way, and to help our grandchildren, Colin and Rose, do the same.1 We haven’t wanted to cast a sour note over all the outdoor fun of dressing up in costumes and going trick-or-treating. But neither have we wanted to let the great church tradition of All Hallows Eve get lost among the loose collection of ideas (both ancient and modern) that haunt every advertisement on TV with ghouls, ghosts and spooks, and that sometimes get mixed up in a more serious way with notions of witchcraft, sorcery, and even fascination with the dead (necromancy). All of the latter really belongs to a different, non-biblical worldview.
So, without writing a doctoral thesis, how can one go about this task? How about starting with the word “Halloween” itself? This word, as anyone can find with a little online research, is a shortening (circa 16th century) of the Old English and Scottish dialect for the phrase “All Hallows Evening.” That is, the evening of October 31 prior to the day on November 1 when the church celebrates all of the “Hallows.” And what then or who are the “hallows”? They are the “holy ones,” that is, all of the saints, both living and dead. They are not holy in the sense of being perfect people, as though they have “already arrived” (Philippians 3:12-14). Rather, they are being made holy (hallowed) because they have put their faith in Christ and given their lives into his guidance and care. But why then should we celebrate all of these living and dead saints together? No better answer can perhaps be given than that provided by the verses of the great 19th century hymn, “For All the Saints.”
For all the saints, who from their labors rest, who thee by faith before the world confessed, thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest. Alleluia.
Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might; thou, Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight; thou, in the darkness drear, their one true light. Alleluia.
O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold, fight as the saints who nobly fought of old, and win with them the victor’s crown of gold. Alleluia.
O blest communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleuia.
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia.
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast, through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Alleluia.
All Hallows Eve, then, is about the communion of the saints above with the saints below. Or, to put it another way, it is about the fellowship of the church triumphant (already at rest and waiting for the great day of the Lord, the day of resurrection and judgement, Rev. 6:9-11) and the church militant (still engaged in spiritual warfare on the earth until the Lord has put all of the rebellious forces and powers back in order under his authority, 1 Cor. 15:20-28). As in the Epistle to the Hebrews (chapter 11), we who are still alive take courage and example from those who have gone before and who show us how to be faithful. And in contrast to the ancient (and some modern) pagan festivals, such as Samhain, this is not a matter of trying to interact with the dead, or to call them up so that we might communicate with them or make use of them in some way. Rather, it is a celebration of the great purpose of our Creator to which we, like they, have been called to participate: the restoration of the world and of our own lives as subjects, stewards, worshippers, and partners with and under God.2
With this biblical worldview as our framework, then, Deb and I have created over the last few years an album of photos and stories for our grandchildren, an album for All Hallows Eve that informs the children about their own immediate ancestors who have gone before them, and upon whose shoulders they stand as they also take up the calling to join the spiritual battle, and to become whole and fully human beings in the care and under the power and guidance of the risen Lord. This effort seems all the more important when set against the recent and ongoing attacks of “woke” and “progressive” activists, where the religious and moral traditions of our ancestors have been ridiculed and defiled without serious understanding, honor, loyalty, or respect.
What follows below, then, is a simple story with a few pictures of one of our Gallaway “hallows” that Deb and I have added to the album for this year, 2024. We hope you will enjoy and appreciate this unusual story about Craig’s older brother, Jerry; but also, we encourage you to recall stories of grace and faith from among your own ancestors and forebears, and to remember them together for the benefit of your family and others.
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Gerald Kent (Jerry) Gallaway, 1943 – 2014
Your Great Uncle on Your Father’s Side
Jerry Gallaway riding his horse, Juniper, high in the Sangre de Christo Mountain range near Lindrith, New Mexico where he raised his family and was the care taker for a piece of property that belonged to the actor, Dennis Hopper.
From an early age, Jerry was a remarkable fellow. He excelled in many things such as art, sports, and academics, and yet he was kind and likeable. In high school he was captain of the football team and president of his senior class. In college he played football and became a folk singer in 60s folk music scene. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jerry, however, is how far his path led him in different directions.
Jerry running the football in 1962 as a member of the football team for The Hill Preparatory School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
He left college, football, and “normal” society in the 1960s and joined the youth “hippie” revolution in San Francisco. When that movement fell apart, he fled the city and went into the wilderness of New Mexico. He eventually became a Christian, had a family, and lived like a 19th century settler on the frontier. His life was hard in many ways, and he did not reach all his goals; but what finally held his life together was his faith in God. He wanted above all to become God’s witness.
Jerry after many years living in the wilderness of Northern New Mexico, raising his family and learning to live off the land. Here he is playing the guitar at the wedding reception for his eldest daughter.
Matthew 5:16, “Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father who is in heaven.”
Endnotes
1. The body of this essay was first posted for All Hallows Eve in 2023. I am re-posting it now in 2024, with a new page for this year remembering my older brother Jerry. Jerry left this present life in 2014, and began his own time of waiting with the Lord and with the Saints in paradise for the Day of Resurrection and Judgement, for the wedding feast of the Lamb and the great crescendo of the New Creation when God comes down to dwell with his people. I look forward to seeing him again in the full renewal of our lives promised in Christ.
2. It is important to notice in this regard that the New Testament is far more interested in the ongoing effort of the people of God in this life, and in their ultimate destiny in the New Creation (see Romans 8:18-39; 1 Cor. 15:35-58; and Rev. 21-22) than in any detailed description of the current intermediate state of those who have died or “fallen asleep” in Christ. Excellent reading on these matters can be found in the works of N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, and The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the previous part, Part 6, we looked at how a recovery of the biblical view of salvation, in its full scope, can help us to avoid the pitfalls of “cheap grace” and “passive faith”–pitfalls which, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas, were responsible for the failure of the German churches in the 1930s to resist and even to stop Hitler’s totalitarian buildup. In this final part, we shall look at two more features of biblical faith that can also help us to avoid these pitfalls in our own time, and to register more fully why a truly biblical faith holds such deep resonance with the principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (AACT), and therefore with our founders’ vision and our Constitutional heritage.]
2. The Active Nature of Faith. Both Bonhoeffer and Metaxas draw attention to the danger of regarding faith merely as a matter of mental assent. For example, Metaxas warns against Luther’s notion of sola fides (faith alone) which has seemed, at least to some, to imply an opposition between faith and good works or active human effort in any sense.[i] But Luther’s error lay in trying to read the problems of his own time (the medieval cult of indulgences and the debate about Pelagius from the fifth century) back into the writings of Paul and James on “faith and works” in the first. For Paul, however, the problem was not with good works or human effort in general, but with the very specific Torah works of circumcision, kosher, and sabbath keeping by which the Jews of his day boasted of an identity superior to everyone else, a “righteousness of their own” (Romans 10:3). So, for Paul, as a believer in King Jesus, what mattered most was “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). And in this regard, Paul was in complete agreement with James. For just as James could warn of the dangers of mere mental assent (“Even the devils believe,” 2:19) and urge his readers to “show their faith by their works (2:18); so, Paul wrote, as above, of “faith working through love,” and of how “God has created us in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared ahead of time as the road we must travel” (Ephesians 2:10). Indeed, once we set aside the false opposition between faith and good works, the theme of active faith appears everywhere in Paul’s instructions for the churches—for example, as when he calls them to stop “yielding their bodies to sin” (Romans 6:12-14) and “to present their bodies as living sacrifices to God so that they may test and discover his perfect will” (Romans 12:1-2).
This notion of a passive faith of mere mental assent is pernicious in America today in so far as it plays into the false segregation of religion to a private sphere of individual, merely inward experience. Had Jesus or the early Christians practiced such a “faith,” they would never have come into conflict with the powers of the Roman state or the Jewish establishment of their own time. Furthermore, the administrative state today (like the German state in the 1930s) will also readily accept our religion so long as we are willing to keep it private, leaving the ordering of the public sphere (such as our public schools and businesses and media, etc.) to them. But this would be to abandon not only our biblical mandate for a faith that actively embraces the full scope of salvation, but also our founders’ hope for a religious and a moral people who actively promote the values upon which our nation’s highest hopes are grounded.
3. The Synergy of Grace and Faith. The biblical way of full salvation and active faith leads finally to a way of life that unfolds daily in our families and congregations and neighborhoods. It is a way of life grounded in what God has done for us in Jesus and the Spirit by sheer grace; and, at the same time, a way of life that requires our whole-hearted commitment and obedience (Romans 12:1-2). We cannot save ourselves. No! But God will not save us without our full participation. Indeed, what he wants above all is a willing and mature partner who acts out of freedom and love to be his partner, made in his image, helping to restore the fallen, broken, and disordered world.[ii] And so, after calling the Christians at Philippi to “have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus,” the Apostle Paul goes on calling them to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work within you both to will and to do his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:5-13).
This synergy of grace and faith takes place, moreover, in the hard won and remedial path of daily discipleship that unfolds as we give thanks for our sufferings through which God is inwardly restoring our own character (Romans 5:3-5). And it takes place, further, in the outward suffering that comes from being persecuted by those who oppose the way of grace and faith (whether in Xi’s CCP or in the Biden-Harris administrative state) because it opposes their demands for dominance and control (Philippians 1:27-30). This is the way of faith that embraces Jesus’s call to purity of heart in marriage, and mercy even to enemies (Matthew 5:21-48). It is Paul’s call to “take every thought captive for Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10:5). It is the way of moral freedom in Christ, and of the fruits of his Spirit such as self-control, kindness, and patience (Galatians 5). It is the way of costly discipleship which Paul himself described as “knowing the power of his resurrection, and the partnership of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). And it is a direct response to Jesus’s own invitation, “If anyone would be my disciple, he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
Such a synergy of grace and faith embodies, note well, the freedom of moral conscience and religious practice that are protected by our American Constitution and Bill of Rights, protected against the overreach of our own government. We are free, and should be left free, to pursue this way of faith and life. The government has a role to play, to be sure, in restraining evil by the rule of law (Romans 13:1-7), but it has no role to play in the synergy of grace and faith, except to encourage its free operation and exercise (as the First Amendment says). Furthermore, the synergy of grace and faith takes place within and rises up from the most basic levels of our familial, communal, congregational, and personal lives—the daily path of conscious, intentional, and prayerful discipleship with each other. And because of this the synergy of grace and faith has far-reaching social, cultural, and political consequences, for it shapes how we see the issues that the government itself would address (for example, the false “crises” of the Biden-Harris state) as well as how we see the limited role of government in responding to real needs or crises when they arise. Why would we cede the sovereignty of this relationship between God and his people to any agent or officer of the state? Such agents are themselves in need of grace and faith.
In this way, the biblical synergy of grace and faith provides a remarkable framework within which to hear again the words of James Madison from The Federalist Papers: “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” And, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”[iii] But as it is, so long as “reason is fallible,” and human passions distort human judgement, we will need a form of government that can control not only the lawless among us, but also itself.[iv] And so, the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace through faith finds deep and abiding resonance with the constitutional legacy of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition.
Conclusion
If these reflections have been at all on target, then we may now be in a better position than when we began this study seven weeks ago to respond faithfully to the “Spiritual and Political Battle of Our Times.” In particular, these reflections may help us decide how to vote in the coming presidential election. At this stage in our recent history, in my estimation, and based on the whole sequence of arguments and evidence presented above, there can be no real question that Donald Trump and the common sense conservative tradition, stands much closer to the principles of both the AACT and of the Christian synergy of grace and faith than does Joe Biden or his protégé, Kamala Harris. This is so despite Trump’s personal fallibilities; and, of course, the fallibilities of both Biden and Harris, both as a persons and as politicians, are now constantly emerging into fuller and wider view as well.[v] But if we take the long view required by the full scope of biblical salvation, and by the synergy of grace and active faith, we must also look beyond all of these candidates by themselves. We must consider the principles that each of them has tried to promote, and we must think of candidates for the future in 2028 and 2032 and beyond, who will carry forward the strengths of the AACT and dismantle the corruptions of the administrative state. We must think of grace and faith, and of principles and policies, and of candidates always in that light.
Therefore, for all who are willing, along with Deborah and me, to take up the task at hand, let us embrace whole-heartedly the prayer that the Apostle prayed for the Christians at Philippi (1:9-11). He wanted to encourage them in the midst of their own sufferings under a different administrative state, and to steal their wills for the ongoing synergy of grace and faith that lay before them. And so, he wrote to them,
“This is what I am praying: that your love may overflow still more and more, in knowledge and in all astute wisdom. Then you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil, and be sincere and faultless on the day of the Messiah, filled to overflowing with the fruit of right living, fruit that comes through King Jesus to God’s glory and praise.”
[ii] This insight is expressed with great power by C. S. Lewis in his Screwtape Letters, chapter eight, on the “law of undulation,” and how God uses the troughs of life more than the peaks to achieve the perfect freedom of willing obedience and love that he intends for us.
[iii] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New American Library: New York, 1961) No. 51, p. 322.
[v] I say this fully aware of President Trump’s former playboy lifestyle and marital infidelities. But I also note that these moral failures were all in the past when he ran for office the first time in 2016; and that he seems to have turned away from (that is, repented of) his former way of life in the intervening decade or more. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of repentance and forgiveness does not promote holding on to an unforgiving spirit toward others (of either party) whom we may consider less righteous than ourselves. Sheesh!
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the previous part of this series, Part 5, we tried to come to grips with the dreadful seriousness of the political, cultural, and spiritual choices that stand before us now in the approaching electoral decision between a continuation of the Biden-Harris administrative state, on the one hand, and a brave recovery of the basic principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition, upon which our country was founded, on the other. In this part and the next and final part, we shall be looking even more closely at the role of religious faith in the ACCT as this provides the critical foundation in our families, our congregations, and our communities for the kind of deep recovery that is needed if we as a nation are to navigate the embattled road ahead. Again, we turn initially to Metaxas and Bonhoeffer for clues about what went wrong in 1930s Germany.]
The Way of Faith
If it is true, and no exaggeration, that the administrative state under Joe Biden has now become—like the dictatorial Nazi state of Adolf Hitler (or the totalitarian state of the CCP with its plans to defeat the West from within)—the direct enemy of the religious and moral principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition, then how is it possible that the churches in America today (like those in 1930s Germany) have allowed this to happen? Why have our churches failed to stand up sooner or push back harder against the enemy who stands at the door? Why have the churches in some cases even become advocates for the state’s corrupt agenda?[i] Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas have tried to answer these questions in their own contexts. Let us look briefly at their answers as we work together to bring these reflections to a proper conclusion.
Bonhoeffer gave his answer in his remarkable book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937). The problem, says Bonhoeffer, is that the churches in Germany had too often settled for a “gospel” that contained only “cheap grace” instead of following their master, Jesus, in the way of “costly grace.” They settled for a message of forgiveness without the call to discipleship. They had become comfortable with the idea of being forgiven (“justified”) without seeing the need for a full-bodied, whole-of-life response to the God who gave his Son that we might live. Luther himself was deeply committed to “the justification of the sinner in the world,” says Bonhoeffer; but the German churches had allowed this to degenerate into something completely different, “the justification of sin and the world.”[ii] When Luther spoke of grace, says Bonhoeffer, he “always implied that it cost him his own life, the life which was now subjected for the first time to the absolute obedience of Christ.”[iii] Such grace is costly because it “costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”[iv] “Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son; ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”[v] Thus, according to Bonhoeffer, a cheapened idea of “grace” divorced from the call to discipleship allowed the German churches to ignore the cultural, political, and spiritual tragedy that was taking place right in front of them. They were already “saved,” so they did not need to concern themselves with these other “political” matters.
Like Bonhoeffer in Germany, Eric Metaxas has also worked diligently to decipher what has gone wrong in many American churches today. Why have our churches failed to stand up against the atrocities of the Biden state?[vi] According to Metaxas, we have repeated the errors of the German church by making faith a matter of mental assent to a doctrine of forgiveness that does not include our Lord’s call to the way of costly, whole-hearted discipleship.[vii] This false separation of faith and discipleship is reinforced, moreover, by defining “faith” as though it were opposed to “works” of any kind.[viii] As a result, many of our churches think of their role only in terms of “evangelism,” but even that is defined to exclude the good news of moral effort and recovery in Christ, especially anything that might be construed as “political.”[ix] Of course, Metaxas objects strongly to this conclusion, as he himself cannot conceive in scriptural terms of a truly Christian Church that does not take strong public positions on matters such as abortion, racial harmony, radical gender ideology, the role of parents in our public schools, and the coercive overclaims of the administrative state.[x]
Turning Around and Looking Forward
If we are to recover the religious dimension of our Anglo-American Conservative Tradition in America today, we must somehow correct the missteps of cheap grace and passive faith that Bonhoeffer and Metaxas have identified. To this end, I want to highlight three basic principles from Scripture that can help us move faithfully in this direction. For present purposes, I will not go into these in detail. Rather, I want only to outline them in a way that suggests their relevance to the cultural and spiritual battle at hand, even for readers who are not themselves at present active Christian believers.[xi] The principles do provide, however, a solid biblical footing for avoiding the pitfalls in question. Moreover, they may also help us to discern more clearly the deep resonance that exists between biblical faith and the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition itself, as well as the necessary opposition of both to the dictatorial pretensions of the administrative state.
1. The Full Scope of Salvation. In keeping with the insights of Bonhoeffer and Metaxas, we need to recover a more biblical conception of the full scope ofsalvation—that is, what it means for God to save us. In Philippians 1:6, for example, the Apostle Paul encourages the struggling Philippians with the following declaration of his own faith. “Of this I am convinced: the one who began a good work in you will thoroughly complete it by the day of King Jesus.” Paul clearly has in mind the same framework for salvation that he portrays in amazing detail in Romans 8:22-30, where he speaks of how the whole creation is waiting in eager expectation for the day of resurrection when the children of God will be set free to lead all creatures in proper praise and stewardship. The full scope of salvation, thus, includes forgiveness of sins, to be sure, but it also reaches to the restoration of the image of God in human life (after the pattern of the Son of God, v. 29) and to the restoration of creation itself. What is more, as in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, this restoration is an ongoing project, for the risen Jesus continues to reign as Lord “until he has put all his enemies under his feet,” and then God the Father will become “all in all” (v. 28). The picture of the full scope of salvation is then rounded out in Revelation 21-22 with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, where death is no more and God comes down to dwell with his people.
When we understand the scope of salvation in this full and biblical way, there can be no question of a merely private or individual experience of forgiveness as an end in itself. Nor can the sphere of religion be reduced (as the modern liberal state would prefer) to a merely private realm of individual piety that has no effect in the sphere of public life and culture. Our Lord is the Lord of human life and of all creation. His purpose is to put everything in the fallen world back in order (to “save” it) and all areas of life are subject to his Lordship. His forgiveness paves the way for his restoration (Romans 5:6-11). If we in America today are to recover our own tradition as a religious and a moral people, we will need to embrace this great vision for the full scope of salvation, and endeavor faithfully in our families, our congregations, and our communities to work it out with our Lord’s guidance in every sphere of life—including public, political, and cultural life.
Looking ahead to Part 7
In the final part of this series, we shall look at two more features of biblical faith that further embody what it means to embrace the full scope of salvation. These are: 1) the active nature of faith demonstrated by good works, and 2) the synergistic nature of faith as an ongoing journey of discipleship in response to the grace of the living God–Father, Son, and Spirit. How do these dimensions of faith echo and reinforce the principles of the AACT that our founders intentionally built into our Constitutional tradition? That is the final question that I ask you to consider as we conclude this study into the spiritual and political battle of our times.
Endnotes
[i] My own former denomination, The United Methodist Church, for example, has recently split itself apart as those who retain the UMC name have, nevertheless, turned their backs completely on the moral and biblical guidance of their own Wesleyan tradition. At least a quarter of the congregations of the former denomination have now disaffiliated to join other orthodox Methodist branches or to establish independent congregations. If the leaders of the now apostate UMC continue in the direction they have chosen, many more people and congregations will, I believe, eventually join this mass exodus as the unbiblical, anti-Christian, and anti-nature implications of the wayward denomination become more and more obvious.
[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1937) p. 53.
[viii] Much of the problem in this regard arose from Martin Luther’s own confusion about the Pauline contrast between “faith” and “works” (e.g., Ephesians 2:8-10). Paul had in mind the “works” of Jewish ethnic purity (such as circumcision, kosher, sabbath, etc.) which are not a substitute for the life of faith and good works that he promotes everywhere in his letters (Ephesians 2:10). Luther, however, confused the concept of “works” with the pseudo-Pelagian notion of human effort in general and with the medieval Catholic practices of indulgences. Thus, Luther also had difficulty recognizing the complete agreement between Paul and James on the relation between faith and good works. This confusion still misleads many today, who regard themselves as orthodox or conservative Christians.
[xi] It is interesting to note, in this regard, the recent avowal of atheist Richard Dawkins that, though he is not a Christian believer himself, he recognizes the irreplaceable importance of the Christian faith as a foundation for the moral order of freedom in the West. And that order he does very much affirm and wish to preserve.
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the previous part of this essay, Part 4, we concluded our brief review of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (ACCT) as it provides ways to recover from the destructive and disintegrative results of the administrative state. We also began to inquire about the relative seriousness of the differences between the policy positions of the Biden administrative state (on matters such as climate alarmism and economic policy, or racial and gender ideology and public education), and the policy positions of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. Are these differences just a matter of partisan and cultural opinion, or do they strike a deeper, more critical blow at moral and political principles that really and truly are non-negotiable for those on either side? In this part, we seek to answer these questions following the insights of Eric Metaxas and his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.]
A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History
In his small but compelling book, Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas helps us face these questions, and begin to answer them. Metaxas’s Letter is a plea to our American churches, but also to American citizens in general, to wake up to the awful and calamitous moment in which we are living. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this moment in our history is ominously similar to the period of the 1930s in Germany, when the German people and their churches closed their eyes and sat quietly by (no doubt in concern for their own comfort, safety, and security) while Hitler and his Nazi party turned their country into a totalitarian state that would eventually decimate other nations and destroy its own soul by its demonic genocide of the Jews. Perhaps one who has not studied this period closely, or looked in our own time beyond the thin virtuous veneer of the Biden state (constantly patched and polished by the corporate media) might doubt this comparison. Isn’t this talk of Germany, Hitler, and America just a lot of hyperbole? Except, perhaps, when Biden applies it to Trump and his supporters?
If we are to take seriously Metaxas’s comparison between America under the Biden state and Germany under the Hitler regime, we need to revisit some of the “false crises” mentioned earlier in Part 2, only now to see them in sharper detail and to grasp why they cannot be regarded merely as “policy” choices. For example, let us try to form a concrete picture in our minds of the desperate plight of inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, or New York, where no one is safe, not even children, because young black men have been told that they are the victims of systemic racism and therefore have a right to snatch life and property from anyone who gets in the way of their “freedom.” Picture, if you will, the bodies lying in the street as life and possibility drain away? This is happening now in Democrat-led cities across our nation, as rogue prosecutors push their agenda on unsuspecting voters under the guise of legal reform. This is what Kamala Harris herself has promoted on public video during the BLM, defund-the-police riots of 2020. This is what the administrative state produces when “pure reason” and politicized “science” are applied to social problems without the moral guardrails of religion and the family, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
Or, we might look more closely at the devastation caused to thousands of people and small businesses by Biden’s COVID lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Thousands are still waiting for our government to take responsibility for the terrible harm it has done. Can you see those who are still shaking with neurological tremors caused by adverse reactions to the experimental COVID shots, not to mention those who are already dead? They are invisible to the Biden state. Or, yet again, we might look at the explosion of fentanyl deaths, human trafficking, and sex trafficking caused by the criminally-open Biden-Harris border policies. Neither Biden nor Harris, nor their DHS staff, nor their cooperant media ever speak of these deaths and depravities. And then, looking to the future, God help us, we should try to picture soberly what will happen to our economy if the miscalculations of the Biden-Harris Green-New-Deal policies ever take full effect. The outcome could literally rival the atrocities and degradations of Mao’s infamous “bird famine” as supply chains falter and food supplies stop. Ideological, politicized science is not real science.
All of these and more could be depicted in graphic and ruinous detail; but my goal is to awaken our consciences and to stimulate courage and conviction that leads to active resistance and change; not to overwhelm with shocking images, however realistic the images are in fact. Nonetheless, in the interest of conscience and conviction, let me give one more example in greater detail, one that may be the most compelling of all for many of us.
If we need to face with full seriousness the resident evil of the Biden state (just as German citizens had eventually to face the death camps in 1945) then let us picture without turning away the scarred and mutilated bodies of children and minors who have been subjected under Biden’s Public Health Service to the lucrative medical experiments of so-called “gender affirming care.”[i] These are minors and children as young as 11 years old (with younger children in public schools across the nation being indoctrinated as we speak) who have followed the advice of “experts,” teachers and counselors, and some psychologists and doctors. They have taken experimental drugs (puberty blockers) for which no long-term studies of safety or effectiveness are as yet even possible, much less available.[ii] They have submitted to radical experimental surgeries that leave them with ghoulish scars and monstrous appendages that require ongoing medical care and attention, often for the rest of their lives. They face a life with permanent disfigurement, often combined with the loss of any ability to have children of their own. And yet, the promoters of this defacement of human life in the Biden state (and in groups like WPATH, whose junk science provides the so-called “standards of care”) do not want us to see or hear from the growing number of “de-transitioners,” children who have come of age, changed their minds, and are now being left to face all of this damage, much of it irreversible, on their own.[iii]
How much further would radical gender surgery have to go before people of common sense and sensitive conscience, and a measure of good faith, stand up and cry out, “Enough! Cease! Desist! Stop in the name of God and of all that is decent!”? We ourselves may not want to hear these stories. They are hard to imagine, nearly at times imponderable in their devastation. But then, Hitler did not want the German people to know what was going on in the camps under the direction of Joseph Mengele. And the German people did not want to hear or believe what they were forced by Eisenhower to see and smell when the camps were thrown open after the war. Metaxas warns us, in the spirit of his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that if we refuse to face what is happening now, then we, like the German people in the 1930s, are at least tacitly accepting and supporting it.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.”[iv]
And if we do hear and begin to speak out, will we then follow up this outcry with campaigns to elect leaders who represent a genuinely religious and moral people, leaders who will dismantle the authoritarian administrative state, and require again that our country’s laws and its character be subject to a truly representative process? According to Metaxas what we need most is a recovery of genuine faith.
Looking ahead to Part 6
In the next two parts of this study, Parts 6 and 7, we shall look more closely at what went wrong among the German churches and the German people in the 1930s that allowed Hitler and his Nazi Party to come to power without greater opposition. According to both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his biographer, Eric Metaxas, what went wrong had to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical meaning and practice of “faith” and “discipleship.” As you prepare for the next part, consider the following questions: Does our faith in Jesus and his Spirit prepare us to engage in matters of cultural and political consequence? If so, why and how does our faith in him have this result? And, if not, why not?
Endnotes
[i] The head of Biden’s Public Health Service is, of course, Admiral Rachel Levine, who has been aggressive in promoting radical gender ideology in our public health services and in our public schools, even when this involves hiding the school-based “counseling” process from parents. For up to date tracking of state sponsored rules and mandates for radical gender ideology in public schools across the nation see the online data and research of Parents Defending Education, and consider becoming a supporter of their important work.
[ii] See Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024), and Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020).
[iii] For firsthand accounts of the suppression of information about de-transitioners by WPATH and other medical groups (who now have a great deal to lose, given the rising number of malpractice cases) see the stories of Chloe Cole and the ongoing research of groups such as Genspect. A recent Genspect webinar compared the current craze for radical gender surgery on minors with the infamous fad for lobotomies that captured the medical profession for a brief time during the 1930s and 40s.
[iv] Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Salem Books, 2022) p. 51.
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the last part, we looked at the first three of five principles that, according to Yoram Hazony, characterize the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. In this part, we will look at two more: Limited Executive and Freedom. All five of these principles together describe a pathway for creating a national political order that moves forward by trial and error as it is grounded in the common faith, the moral and legal tradition, and the familial formation of the people themselves. Historical Note: On July 13, four days before my last posting, Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump in Butler, PA. He narrowly failed. Since that time, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, and Kamala Harris is now the democrat candidate for 2024. In view of these as yet unresolved events, I will continue to refer in these comments to the “Biden Administrative State,” since he is still president; but I shall also begin to speak of the Biden-Harris state as well, because she has been his full partner in every policy at every step along their way.]
4. Limited Executive. The principle of a limited executive in the AACT came into its own with what is known in English history as the Glorious Revolution. After a long period of warfare and unrest between Protestant and Catholic forces, the British Parliament voted to return William of Orange to the throne as a limited monarch in 1689. This was, at the same time, a rejection of absolute monarchy as promoted by those in the Catholic (Stuart) tradition. The decision established a “constitutional monarchy,” limiting the authority of the king by leaving various powers (such as taxation and the raising of an army) in the hands of the Parliament, not the king. Parliament (French parle, to speak) was to be a place of representative governance where the members debate issues in an open forum to establish laws and make national decisions. This framework is, of course, reflected in our American heritage by several principles: the branches of government, the separation of powers, the demarcation between federal and state powers in the Tenth Amendment, and the principle of checks and balances by which each branch is held in check by the others against any attempt at absolute or dictatorial authority.
The executive activities of the Biden state that regularly defy the checks and balances of the other two branches are everywhere in evidence: From the Biden DHS’s open southern border that willfully ignores existing immigration laws, to the Biden DOE’s attempts to forgive unilaterally billions of dollars of student debt and to indoctrinate children in public school with DEI and radical gender ideology, to the Biden EPA’s attempts to dictate rules for major consumer products, to the Biden DOJ’s use of lawfare to prosecute January 6th protestors and Trump himself, using statutes that have been stretched beyond all recognition. The Biden state evidently sees no inconsistency between its dictatorial practices and the call of our Constitution for legislative and judicial checks and balances. So much for representative “democracy.”
To restore the kind of limited executive envisioned by the AACT will require, among other things, a significant reform and downsizing of the administrative state itself, as well as a return to regular order in the budgetary practices of the House of Representatives. The executive branch should not control its own budget, as Biden seeks to do. This means returning for the first time since the 1970s to the use of individual budgetary committees in the House, where each of the major budget areas can be debated in a bipartisan manner before any bill is brought to the floor of the House for general debate and voting. It will also mean getting rid of the current fiasco of omnibus bills, cobbled together by a partisan majority with lots of “pork barrel” spending run in, without open debate (and often without serious reading) and passed under premeditated pressure at the last minute “to avoid a government shutdown.” The latter procedure under the Biden administrative state promises to turn our current $35 trillion national debt into some $50 trillion over the next ten years. This is the path to economic ruin led by an absolute executive who does not know how to say “no” to himself or to his party. (Kamala Harris has shown that she will keep or even increase these levels of government spending if she becomes president.) The health of our country depends on a return to fiscal and monetary self-control and discipline, a return to a limited executive.
5. Individual Freedom. The fifth and final principle of the AACT, as outlined by Hazony, is one that nearly everyone will want to affirm, yet many will define in nearly opposite ways. This is the principle of individual freedom. Given what we have already seen about the AACT, and its wariness toward the idealistic rationalism of the French Revolution, it will perhaps come as no surprise that the meaning of the concept of “freedom” was itself under scrutiny from the earliest days of our national experiment. And this concern, still very much alive in our cultural and political conflicts today, has to do largely with the role of tradition in relation to the meaning and practice of freedom.
Within the framework of the AACT, freedom in its deepest sense has to do with achieving a good and virtuous way of life. One is truly free only when one is free for healthy, life-giving relationships, and free from what is harmful or destructive. To get one’s way, and yet to be destructive of one’s own life or the lives of others is not to be free, but a slave to one’s own appetites and passions. Thus, the AACT conception of freedom is the freedom of moral tradition and constraint. By contrast, for the point of view that descends from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, freedom is primarily understood as the freedom of the individual from all constraints except those to which one chooses to give consent (based on the individual’s alleged access to purereason). In one case, freedom is discovered through the obligations of family, congregation, and community life as these have been shaped by a specific religious, moral, and legal tradition. In the other, freedom implies release from all such obligations unless the individual finds his own independent “reasons” to consent. The latter conception is the freedom of the liberal post-enlightenment worldview with its related fantasy notions of “natural equality” and “pure reason.”[i]
The liberal conception of individual freedom without parental, religious, or traditional moral constraint is clearly assumed in the Biden administration. The promotion of radical gender and sexual ideologies in our public schools in defiance of parental authority is a case in point. The scientific basis for such programs is, it should be noted, subject to serious doubt due to the denial of basic biology in defining sex and gender. Nonetheless, schools that do not comply by teaching and promoting the state’s ideology are threatened with loss of government funding. And schools that do comply are encouraged to teach and counsel children without parental involvement or approval, especially when teachers or counselors think the parents might not approve.[ii] With this ideology in place, cases of so-called “gender dysphoria” have risen by over 4,000 percent in recent years, especially among young teenage girls.[iii] This clearly confirms Sowell’s claim that the government’s programs often provoke and even promote the very problems they are supposed to address.
To recover the practice of freedom in the AACT will require, above all, rediscovering and reaffirming the role of religious faith and the family in the formation of individual character. This is crucial for all ethnic groups; but especially for the black community, where the welfare state has wrecked immense havoc on both the family and the traditions of faith.[iv] In very practical terms the recovery of the family will include a recovery of the role of prayer and Scripture in family life, and of the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents “that it may be well with you in the land.” In an age where young people have taken up the neo-Marxist cudgel against all traditions by tearing down monuments and cursing the heritage of leaders like Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., this will mean learning again a sense of humility toward our elders, despite their flaws and failings. Learning, that is, to ask questions again of our parents and grandparents about what they have experienced, why they think as they do, and why they have embraced the values that they hope to pass along to us.[v]
We have only touched the surface here of the five principles that shape the AACT. And we have only mentioned a few highlights of what it would mean in practical terms to recover these principles in 2024. A thorough reading of Hazony will suggest many more, especially with regard to the role and practice of the family and family life. Some readers may look at this forecast of recovery as a fool’s errand. Does anyone really believe that it is possible today for our society to experience a religious and cultural awakening where the role of the family and the rule of law are once again the testing ground for our best efforts and our highest aspirations? Perhaps the real question we should be asking, given the trajectory of the Biden state, is just the reverse: “What will it mean if we do not take up this task and recover our heritage?”
Looking ahead to Part 5
The contrast between the political order of the administrative state and that of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition should be clear by now, at least in basic terms, to anyone who has followed the argument thus far. The question must now be asked, however, if this contrast is nothing more than a continuation of the disagreements and diverging opinions that have always characterized the American two-party system. In other words, are the differences between radical gender ideology and the Christian moral tradition of the family, or that between legal immigration and an open border, or that between a command-and-control economy and a free market, only a matter of differing policy opinions? Or is something deeper, harsher, and more fracturing at stake? Are all of these “options” negotiable? Or are some of them beyond the pale of negotiation? These are the questions I would ask you to consider as you prepare for Part 5.
Endnotes
[i] Fantasies? If we simply assume the Enlightenment rhetoric of “pure reason” and “natural equality,” then we may question why these concepts should be regarded by anyone as rationalistic or idealistic fantasies. The hard truth, however, is that neither can be demonstrated in concrete human experience. No two naturally born people are ever equal to each other in every way, nor even in most ways, even among siblings in the same family. This can be empirically tested in a variety of ways, as Thomas Sowell has shown in Social Justice Fallacies, p.1-21. Likewise, as the structure of all academic and scientific debates amply demonstrates, not to mention ordinary human conversation, the use of reason leads inevitably to disagreements about what is reasonable. One can always seek a better and a more consistent explanation, but the notion of “pure reason” accessible to all people as individuals is a pure fantasy. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 104-110, and Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
[ii] For up to date statistics and descriptions of public school systems across the country that are engaged in these activities of radical gender, sexual, and racial ideology see the online resources of Parents Defending Education.
[iii] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Regnery, 2020; and Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids, Regnery, 2023.
[iv] Robert Woodson frequently points out the great irony that during the awful Jim Crow era, prior to the 1960s, when black families were by and large still intact, older people could walk without fear of crime in their own neighborhoods and teen pregnancies were below the national average.
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the last part, we looked at a number of abuses of power that have characterized the Biden administrative state. We have, perhaps, already begun to suggest how and why the administrative state operates in a way that is inherently antithetical to the principles of our founding, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. In the next two parts we shall look at five of those original principles and try to discern why and how their recovery will necessarily require a large scale reconfiguration of the administrative state itself.]
The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition
I am borrowing the title for this section from Yorum Hazony’s recent and very important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In this book, Hazony explores the history, philosophy, and the ongoing struggle for what he calls the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” (AACT). The AACT reaches back, according to Hazony, at least to the sixteenth century in England, to writers such as John Fortesque, John Selden, and Edmund Burke. It was later deployed (along with its clear precedents for our Bill of Rights, our three branches of government, and our checks and balances) as a model for the US Constitution by our founding leaders such as George Washington and John Adams. This is the tradition of political order that Woodrow Wilson disavowed, and that the Biden state with its manifold “crises” has consistently found ways to violate. What would it mean to recover this tradition today? How might such a recovery redefine the issues of our time, over against the chaotic and destructive results of the Biden state? Hazony describes five basic principles that define the AACT in its long historical development. Let us look at each of these in turn and consider just a few examples of the benefits such a recovery might produce.[i]
1. Historical Empiricism
2. Nationalism
3. Religion
4. Limited Executive Power
5. Freedom
1. Historical Empiricism. The AACT is historical and empirical because its conception of political order is grounded in the most basic and concrete relationships of human life—in families, clans, tribes, congregations, and larger groups that overcome conflicts, clarify justice, and ban together to work for common interests and to defend themselves against common enemies. From this empirical foundation (hard won through the ancient and early medieval history of warring clans and petty kings in Britain) arose the English historical tradition of commonlaw (e.g., the Magna Carta) which led eventually to a national system of parliamentary checks and balances, limited monarchy, petition of rights, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1685. This is the tradition that our American founders (such as Washington, Adams, and Madison) embraced as the archetype for our US Constitution. This is the tradition conserved by the AACT.
Over against this, and consciously opposed by the framers in 1787, was the very different model of the French Revolution based on the rationalistic ideals of natural equality, universal reason, and individual freedom as these were defined by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.[ii] These ideals are exalted today in the liberal tradition of the administrative state, including the Biden state, where political order is attributed to the role of reason (“experts”), equity, and individual consent, not to the traditional values and obligations of family, congregation, community, and nation. We see this model at work in the contempt of the Biden state for our national borders, for parental authority, for principles of traditional moral conscience and religious freedom, not to mention the other basic First Amendment rights that his agencies have trampled. The eventual blood bath of the French Revolution, like the riotous breakdown today of our national borders and of our large crime-ridden urban centers, all demonstrate the terrible disconnection that separates the rationalism of the liberal model from the empirical realities of concrete human life and experience.
To recover the historical and empirical character of the AACT today will involve embracing again the foundations of our national identity in the family, the congregation, the religious and moral tradition, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, all of which have been trampled by the actions of the Biden state. It will also require recovering again the voice of the people in representative government to debate and decide in Congress important social questions of race, gender, and public health policy, rather than cancelling or censoring that voice by an overreaching and imperial executive branch with its attending administrative state, media, and other institutions.
2. Nationalism. What does it mean to be a nation state in the AACT—that is, to practice the virtue of nationalism? The answer to this question is not at all self-evident today since the concept of nationalism itself is regularly skewered and condemned by the advocates of the Biden state.[iii] According to them, nationalism leads to racism and xenophobia (hatred of strangers or other nations). Moreover, Hitler’s “National” Socialist (NAZI) Party is offered as a prototype for the racism and aggression that nationalism is supposed to produce. But the meaning and practice of nationalism in the AACT runs in direct opposition to all of this. Indeed, for anyone acquainted with the AACT, Hitler could never represent the political order of nationalism, despite his use of a cognate term. Rather, he embodied the imperial order of the German state, the political desire to absorb and dominate other nations (not to live in peaceful coexistence with them).[iv] This was in keeping with the long and aggressive history of the German Empire dating back to Roman times. In this regard, ironically, the Biden administrative state, with its dictatorial style at home and its globalist aspirations abroad, has much more in common with Hitler’s mentality (and with the imperial objectives of cultural Marxism and the CCP today) than with the political order of the independent nation state as envisioned by our founders.[v]
A recovery of nationalism in America today, on the other hand, will require turning away from the racist and imperial policies of the Biden state. We shall need to recover, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on individual character, merit, and equal opportunity as the foundation for our multi-ethnic national identity while, at the same time, boldly rejecting the racially divisive polices of the Biden administrative state such as DEI, which judge people as collectives and set them against each other as rival tribes and clans. Likewise, we will need to rebuild and restore our national borders while opposing the terrible effects on our nation’s life and character by the unvetted, open-border immigration policies of Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, we should care about the readiness of legal immigrants to speak our language, understand our history, respect our laws, and embrace our values. As a nation in the AACT we will continue to make room for different ethnic groups, clans, and tribes within our borders so long as they are loyal to the basic legal, religious, and moral values that bind us together. Moreover, we respect the same process at work in other nations as they work out the beliefs, values, and laws that embody their own history and traditions. Racial and international cooperation are both strengthened, not weakened, by the political order of the nation state in the AACT.
3. Religion. When our founders had completed the framing of our Constitution in 1787, they made a point of emphasis to declare that this form of government would require “a religious and a moral people” to make it work.[vi] They had in mind, of course, the Christian religion of the Bible, for that was empirically the religion both of the American colonies and of their English predecessors in the AACT.[vii] They did not, however, try to establish a particular denomination as an official national church. Indeed, they forbade this in the First Amendment of the Constitution itself. This was due in part to the fact that most of the newly formed states already had officially recognized churches. But it was also due to the principle of government “of, by, and for the people.” The founders knew that the formation of strong religious and moral convictions depends above all on the living practice of individuals in families, clans, and congregations. The strength of religious and moral conscience arises not from a government office, nor from a declared statement, but from the living practices of faith, prayer, and a history of shared stories and experiences (working out the meaning of justice, correcting and improving faults, and defending the nation against its enemies) among the people themselves. This is the natural soil of “a religious and a moral people” from which alone can spring the moral reasoning, the informed voting, and the public service of good government.[viii]
To recover the religious dimension of the AACT in America today will require nothing short of a religious and moral re-awakening among the families, clans, tribes, congregations, and communities that make up our nation. This national fabric has been unwound and unwoven since at least the post World War II era by what Hazony calls “liberal democracy,” before which a former “Christian democracy” had still been at work in the nation and its institutions. As Hazony writes, “The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) . . . overturned centuries of common practice by abolishing organized prayer and Bible reading in public schools across the country.”[ix] This trend has now been aggressively expanded by the Biden administrative state with its policies that separate children from the moral and religious guidance of both their parents and their religious heritage.
The resulting situation in our culture today finds those in power seeking to replace the moral foundations of the AACT with pseudo-scientific claims about gender fluidity, systemic racism, climate alarmism, and Bidenomics, based on the flimsy and unreliable notions of “pure reason” and “natural equality.” And those who resist this ideology stand to be accused of anti-democratic “extremism.” This is precisely the cultural situation described in C. S. Lewis’s prescient 1945 book, The Abolition of Man. Having turned away from the moral and religious foundations of our country (in faith, family, and congregation) our culture and its institutions (including a politicized “science”) now flounders in a moral morass of ideological and biological nonsense that is forced upon us by the coercive power and control of a liberal “elite” in the administrative state.
The solution will require what some may regard as an impossibility at this time in American history: a great repentance and reawakening to our need for God, his guidance, judgement, and deliverance in our lives as families, congregations, communities, and individuals.[x] Even for those who are not religious or who embrace another religious tradition, the moral foundations of this recovery should be recognized and embraced. We shall have to learn again to live as a people of faith and moral conviction if our national experiment in representative democracy is going to recover and thrive. So thought Washington and Adams. And history itself shows us that this kind of awakening can in fact occur.[xi]
Looking ahead to Part 4
In Part 4, we shall continue these brief reflections on the principles of the AACT, focusing on the last two: Limited Executive, and Freedom. As you think about today’s post, and look forward to the next, consider the following additional questions: 1) Why is it that the administrative state seems to run by default toward the dangers of authoritarian power? and 2) How is the concept of “freedom” related to or connected with the principles of moral order?
Endnotes
[i] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), pages 336-337.
[ii] See Hazony’s discussion of John Locke and Edmund Burke in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp. 21-29. Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson alone was seduced for a short time by the idealistic claims of the French Revolution. But then he was also absent in France while the others were writing our Constitution, and he returned to America when the failure in France became undeniable. See endnote 23 for further discussion of the “fantasy” status of the Enlightenment principles of “pure reason,” “natural equality,” and “individual freedom.”
[iii] The repeated attacks by Joe Biden himself on MAGA Republicans as “extremists” who threaten “democracy” are a case in point. With this encouragement from their figurehead, many others have followed suit, such as members of the “squad” who accuse Donald Trump of racism for opposing illegal immigration. And in the wider culture the mantra has been taken up by Hollywood celebrities such as Rob Reiner (known appropriately as “Meathead” on the Archie Bunker TV series) who has been particularly outspoken, though poorly informed, in his attacks on what he calls “Christian Nationalism.”
[iv] See Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) for a full discussion of the three major distinctions of political order that we see at work and at odds in the world and in our own country today: 1. Tribalism, 2. Imperialism, and 3. Nationalism. Tribalism is characterized by the constant warfare of independent tribes. Imperialism is characterized by the imposition of coercive power by one tribe or a strong man over all other tribes. And Nationalism is characterized by a coming together of tribes for mutual benefit and defense around shared principles of language, religion, morality, and law.
[v] We should note very strongly, in this regard, that the Biden state has shown a willingness to cede national sovereignty to a variety of global organizations and geo-political bodies including the WHO (on public health policy), the WEF (on economic policy), the UN (on climate and gender policy), and even the CCP (with Biden’s soft foreign policies in relation to China and Iran). Meanwhile, the “unrestricted warfare” ideology of the CCP has captured many of the elites who currently lead the agencies of the Biden state. This points to a whole second level of geo-political activity that hides within the political structure of the Biden state. See Frank Gaffney and Dede Laugesen, The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023).
[vi] In his “Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Likewise, in his farewell address of September 1796, Washington spoke of “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.”
[vii] They could not have been thinking of other religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, or even Judaism, in this context, for that would have been to disengage from the actual people who made up the nation; but they were also aware, in keeping with the AACT itself, that there is a central core of moral order that is evident in all religions, and that each nation should be free to work out the meaning of this order in keeping with its own religious history and traditions. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 18. See also, C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the Tao (his name for this shared moral order) in The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1947).
[viii] In The Abolition of Man, Lewis writes at some length about this process of education in the family, a process that conveys to children, even prior to the age of reason, the habits of the heart, the values of human life that Lewis calls the Tao, and for which he finds evidence in all of the world’s great religions. Lewis also writes about how this sense of moral order and tradition has been undercut by modern educational notions of individual freedom, reason, and “applied” science which reject the traditional, familial, and religious foundations of the Tao. Over the course of three chapters, Lewis traces the modern educational process to its consequences in a society led by elites who are driven by their own individualistic impulses because they are no longer shaped by the honorable values of religious and literary tradition. This seems a rather precise description of our society in the Biden administrative state today.
[x] This does not mean that everyone must join a particular denomination, nor even that everyone must become full-fledged believers and practitioners of biblical faith. It does mean, however, that even unbelievers, and those of other religious traditions, should understand how the rule of law and our constitutional rights in America, as well as the practice of reliable scientific research, arise from and are strengthened by the religious worldview of the Bible. Even Richard Dawkins, the well-known atheist, has recently made confession of this creed.
[xi] I am thinking in this instance of the Wesleyan Awakening in eighteenth century England and the Great Awakening that took place in nineteenth century America. Both of these made significant contributions to the spiritual capital of American culture and political order that are still unfolding in the battle to recover the AACT today.
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
[In the first Part of this series, we looked at how the administrative state grew from its ideological beginnings under Woodrow Wilson to the massive collection of government agencies today with millions of staff and trillions of budgetary dollars under Joe Biden. We also recognized that the power of this unelected bureaucracy has kept pace with its size and budget over all these years, and now operates in many cases to displace the basic moral principles and constitutional rights of the American people. How has this happened? And how does it continue to happen in the Biden state today?]
How the Administrative State Gains and Expands Its Power
How has the administrative state been so successful in expanding its control and consolidating its power? In an early chapter of his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, Thomas Sowell describes the methodology by which the administrative state has for many decades successfully consolidated its own power and wealth. Sowell’s reference to the “anointed” in his title corresponds of course to the “experts” of Woodrow Wilson’s and Frank Goodnow’s now 100-year-old “progressive” project, and to what others today describe as the “elite unelected oligarchy” of our massive federal agencies currently led by Joe Biden.[i]
Sowell’s analysis identifies four steps that are typical of the administrative state’s methodology: 1) Identify a social problem that needs improvement (such as racial disparities in housing, education, or income). 2) Propose a government program as the solution. 3) Ignore statistics that show how the program has failed (usually because it misconstrues both the causes and the solution), in order 4) to increase funding for the program in the next year’s federal budget. The remainder of Sowell’s book, chapter by chapter, examines various programs of the welfare state since the late 1960s (for example, housing, education, teen pregnancy, and single-parent welfare programs) that amply demonstrate the steps of this failed methodology.[ii] In keeping with his own distinguished career—as an economist, statistician, mathematician, and sociologist—Sowell backs up his conclusions with in-depth statistical analysis at every point.
This method of garnering power through misconstrued or even fabricated crises is very much alive in the current administrative state of Joe Biden. The bell weather example in recent memory is, of course, the great harm caused by the government’s handling of the COVID fiasco.[iii] The best analyses now pouring forth from various investigative sources both in Congress and in the wider world show that our government’s declaration of emergency powers was part of a very successful corporate/government campaign (Big Pharma plus the captured elites in the FDA, NIH, NIAID, CDC, etc.) to consolidate both wealth and power into their own hands. It worked to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. And all of this was accomplished, moreover, with the cooperation of corporate and social media and of our federal justice and security agencies (FBI, DOJ, CIA) to censor and silence independent voices of responsible science (such as The Great Barrington Declaration) who tried to expose the scheme.[iv] All of this has had the distinct aroma, it should be well noted, of that coercive alliance between government and corporate power known as fascism.
The pattern of falsely defined issues, based on poorly designed research, that demand government action to avert a misconstrued crisis, is evident in nearly every policy and program of the Biden administrative state. The Biden state tells us, for example, that we have a climate crisis that requires the government to take direct command and control of our energy resources and our economy. And yet responsible scientists such as Stephen Koonin (former Obama EPA lead scientist) in his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, tells us that the so-called crisis is based on an abuse by activist officials (including Obama) of raw data from the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC of the UN). The data, properly evaluated, however, do not support the claim of a climate crisis at all.[v] Indeed, if we follow the Biden state’s mandates for green energy and electric vehicles, we will do nothing to improve the climate, while making an absolute wreck of our own economy, as well as making ourselves dependent on other hostile economies around the world—in particular, China. This kind of miscalculation, as Sowell has observed, is a typical outcome of the command-and-control style of the administrative state.
Similarly, the Biden state tells us that we are in a racial crisis caused by systemic racism, and that this requires the government to impose programs such as DEI, CRT, ESG, and SEL in our schools, businesses, and corporate offices, if they are to lead the nation out of the legacy of slavery. And yet, responsible black leaders from the civil rights era, who currently lead successful programs of racial uplift and dignity in some of our worst inner cities, tell us that these government programs are more inwardly debilitating for American blacks and for society as a whole than the old ugly and unjust outward legacy of overt racism in the south.[vi] Indeed, if we keep following the lead of the Biden administrative state (“If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black”) we can only expect the now fifty-year-old legacy of the dysfunctional welfare state in Democrat-led inner cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington DC to become more violent and destructive.[vii] The progressive state usually makes worse the very “crises” it claims to improve.
Likewise, the Biden state tells us that we have a gender and sexual orientation crisis that requires teaching our children, against their own parents’ moral guidance, that boys can be girls, that males should compete in women’s sports, and that the practices of sex in the LGBTQ movement are just as normal and natural as the traditional moral vision of the Bible regarding the sanctity of marriage and the command to be fruitful and multiply. And yet, responsible scientists and counselors tell us that the gender and sexual experiments of the Biden state are not consistent with mental and social health, nor can they be promoted except by imposing the power of the state to undermine the role of the family and of religion in American life and culture.[viii] Even more concerning, this programmatic attack on religion, the middle class, and the traditional family clearly demonstrates the affinity of the Biden state for the subversive strategies of cultural-Marxism.[ix]
Bundling all of these “crises” together, there is at least one more crisis that is being fabricated and promoted by the Biden state, and that is the so-called crisis of democracy. According to Biden and his supporters, if we do not submit to their doubtful agenda for government programs and mandates to solve the various faux crises of public health, climate alarm, systemic racism, sexual orientation, gender identity, and others, then the health of our democracy is at stake. In other words, if we insist on following the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the free market policies of Donald Trump and others in the conservative movement, then we will fall into an authoritarian state that forces us to accept rules and a way of life that we do not freely choose based on our own values and consciences. Talk about bait-and-switch!
In reality, it is not the conservative tradition that has censored free speech and cancelled genuine open scientific debate about these issues, or shut down our schools and businesses in the name of a false COVID emergency. And it is not the conservative movement that threatens to remove children from the moral guidance of their parents in order to promote a strange and ill-founded sexual and gender ideology. Indeed, if we follow the best principles of the conservative tradition, we shall find just the opposite. There will be room for public debate, for traditional moral principles, and for dissent. And there already is a big-tent tradition of American enterprise and innovation that is open to all, regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. It is to the legacy of this positive vision of our American heritage that we now turn. What would it mean, in response to the cultural disintegration now churning within the Biden state, to recover the principles and traditions of our historic founding?
Looking ahead to Part 3
In the next post, “Part 3: The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition,” we will look at the tradition of religious, moral, and constitutional principles that our founders followed in designing our own constitution and cultural heritage. This is the legacy of the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” as explored by Yoram Hazony in his important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. And it is the tradition now largely defamed and dismantled within the Biden administrative state. The aim of Part 3 will be to consider what it would mean to recover the founder’s vision in our time? As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following questions: 1) How might a recovery of constitutional checks and balances between the branches of government correct and improve the activity of the administrative state with respect to how so-called “crises” are identified and how rules and laws are imposed on society? and 2) How might the recovery of the original biblical, religious, and moral traditions of our founding redefine and reconfigure the various “crises” that currently drive and dominate the Biden state? How would this recovery be accomplished?
Endnotes
[i] These themes are developed extensively in Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy, (Basic Books, 1996), and in his Social Justice Fallacies (Basic Books, 2023). In the latter, for example, Sowell describes the “knowledge fallacies” by which surrogate decision-makers in the government (that is, “experts”) think in terms of abstract mechanisms that do not comprehend the complex relationships of human life and economic activity (pp. 71-81).
[ii] On the issue of teen pregnancy, for example, Sowell observes that unwed pregnancies among black teens have soared in the post 60s era of the welfare state (68%) due to the increased benefits made available to single-parent families, and the subsequent breakdown of the black family in America. By contrast, during the unjust era of Jim Crow laws and segregation, when the black family was nonetheless still intact, unwed pregnancies averaged fewer than 17 percent. Sowell’s research thus reveals the serious and often tragic results of government programs for which the state is usually not held to account. See Social Justice Fallacies, pages 127-129.
[iii] It should be acknowledged, of course, that Donald Trump was also involved in the early stages of the COVID tragedy, along with Anthony Fauci and others in the NIAID, FDA and CDC, not to mention China’s Wuhan Lab. Based on grossly overestimated rates of infection and death, the Fauci team called for unprecedented and harmful restrictions on the constitutional rights of American citizens such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom to protest. Government censorship of so-called “misinformation” ran rampant on social media and in society at large. In 2021, Biden doubled down on these restrictions when he came into office. Trump, by contrast, had often advocated for things that would have helped (such as early treatments) but these went against the well-planned narrative of the Fauci cohort. And Trump, like others in Congress without a science background, was at a disadvantage to offer real-time criticism of Fauci’s authoritarian declarations. Nevertheless, Trump would do well, in my opinion, to revisit his account of those events and to acknowledge that he was over his head and made some serious mistakes by deferring to Fauci’s often pseudo-scientific leadership.
[iv] See, for example, Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery, 2022), and Ramesh Thakur, Our Enemy, the Government: How COVID Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023). See also, Rand Paul, “Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up,” Imprimis, Vol. 52, No. 12, December 2023.
[v] Stephen Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2024). See also, Michael Schellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Also noteworthy in this regard are the recent comments of Noble Laureate John Clausner on the great climate “hoax.”
[vi] Corey Brooks, “America Works: DEI Doesn’t,” Tablet Magazine, January 16, 2024. Robert L. Woodson, Sr., Lessons from the Least of These, 2020.
[vii] Shelby Steele and Eli Steele, What Killed Michael Brown (Man of Steele Productions, 2020): an historic documentary film about the fallacies of systemic racism as demonstrated in the 2014 case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
[viii] Mariam Grossman, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How they Harm Your Child, (Regenery, 2023). Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children, (Regenery, 2023). Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024).
[ix] See “Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education,” New Discourses Podcast, Episode 54, November 19, 2021. This audio discussion examines the influence of Marxist activists such as Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance, 1965) on our American educational system. See also, Dr. Ben Carson, The Perilous Fight: Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family (Zondervan, 2024).
Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen-year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 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.
Most of us would agree, I think, that the people of the United States in 2024 are engaged in a major cultural battle, and that this battle has to do with both our political order and with our most deeply held spiritual values. The battle is often so fierce and complicated, however, that we have difficulty defining it or even describing it in a way that makes broad sense to everyone concerned. And perhaps we should expect this to be the case, since those most visibly engaged are now aligned into two political camps that directly oppose each other, both in how they define key terms (such as “democracy,” “nationalism,” and “freedom”) and even in how they define themselves—with terms such as Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative. Is “nationalism” a good thing or a bad thing? What conception of “freedom” is assumed in our Constitution? Which of the major parties is truly the protector of “democracy”? We are at war even about these basic concepts.
What follows is my attempt to clarify what I think is going on in this conflict. How are the political parties now defining themselves, and why have they drawn the lines of battle where they have? What is the basic problem at work in it all? And what constitutes at least the direction of a solution? I will begin with a description of what has widely been called the “administrative state” as this currently exists in the administration of President Joe Biden, though this state has been expanding in every administration for at least a century. Thus, we begin with a major matrix of what I consider to be the problem.
The Administrative State
The roots of the administrative state in America can be traced rather clearly back at least to the early twentieth century and the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson believed that the founding principles of the US Constitution—such as having three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), each of which affords checks and balances on the others so that no faction can rise to absolute power—had become too slow and ponderous to manage the affairs of an increasingly complex society with large urban centers in a post-industrial world.[i] Therefore, with help from other so-called “Progressives,” such as John Dewey in education and Frank Goodnow in political philosophy, he promoted a scheme to deploy “experts” who were not “politicians” to administer and manage the business of the country. This is, in fact, the main theme of Goodnow’s book, Politics and Administration first published in 1900.
Today, the administrative state in the US has grown to a massive array of 430 different agencies—such as the IRS, the EPA, the FDA and CDC, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, and the SEC, etc. These agencies have a total of 2.95 million federal employees, with an annual budget in 2023 (that grows and expands every year) of about 1.7 trillion dollars just to run the agencies. (This does not include another 4+ trillion in the federal budget to pay for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.) And these agencies have taken to heart Wilson’s original vision that they (not our elected officials in the legislative branch of government) should be in charge of making the laws by which the whole country, its businesses and citizens, should be governed. Some of the agencies, such as the EPA, have even created their own “judicial” officers to settle disputes with citizens and businesses as these arise. So much for checks and balances between the branches of government!
The problem with all of this, besides the sheer impossibility of trying to keep track of or hold accountable such a massive bureaucracy, is that the administrative state now operates independently of the wise form of governance which our founders bequeathed to us. This has made it possible today for the administrative state to function as an unelected faction whose ideology serves special interests. As such, the state now routinely sponsors policies and issues mandates that a majority of US citizens have never voted for and do not support (such as DEI, CRT, radical gender ideology, climate crisis, COVID lockdowns, open borders, student loan “forgiveness,” and the Green New Deal). The recent (July 1, 2024) Supreme Court decision to overturn the so-called “Chevron” doctrine (1984) demonstrates a growing awareness that the laws and policies of our country, especially those that affect major questions where billions of dollars are at stake, should be decided by our elected representatives, who are, after all, accountable to voters in each state for the decisions they make, not by the unelected career bureaucrats of the administrative state whose job security is independent of their policy decisions and their results.
The basic problem, therefore, in our current cultural battles, as I (and many others) see it, can be traced to the matrix of the administrative state, which has expanded and imposed its powers more than ever before in our history during the first three years of the Biden administration.[ii] It is important to note in this regard, that it is Biden himself and his agencies that have been behaving in a unilateral, authoritarian, and dictatorial fashion, though they keep warning us that Donald Trump will be a Hitlerian style dictator if he is re-elected later this year.
Thus, it is Joe Biden who refuses to stop his attempt to buy votes by cancelling billions of dollars’ worth of student loans, even though the Supreme Court has already declared that he does not have the authority to do this without congressional approval. And it is Biden, or his agencies, that demonstrates contempt for our legislative process by using mandates and executive orders to coerce “green” energy, to mandate harmful public health policies and vaccines, to restrict what kinds of household appliances or automobiles our citizens will be allowed to purchase, to leave our borders open to invasion, and to enforce gender and racial ideologies in public schools that separate children from the moral guidance of their parents. This is, quite simply, the behavior of an authoritarian state, not that of a government of, by, and for the people.
Looking ahead to Part 2
In the next post, “Part 2: The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden,” we will look at a number of recent Biden policies (for example: public health, climate, race, gender) along with some of the opposing political and cultural voices (often censored by the pro-Biden press) who warn of grave consequences already occurring as the Biden mandates are followed. As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following two questions: 1) To what extent, in real terms, have the results of Biden’s policies been either helpful or harmful for our people and in our society (for example, at the border, in the economy, or in dealing with inner city crime)? and 2) To what extent has the Biden administration pushed its policies without due regard for the legislative process of checks and balances?
Endnotes
[i] Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. This book was based on Wilson’s 1885 PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University and argued for a more limited discursive role for Congress, while the executive branch became more powerful in the actual administration of society. See also, R. J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
[ii] See, for example, Larry P. Arnn, “The Way Out,” Imprimis (November 2021, Vol. 50, No. 11); and “Education as a Battleground,” Imprimis (November 2022, Vol. 51, No. 11). In addition to these two short articles (available online), the dozens of other sources cited in the endnotes for this seven-part series will reveal numerous overlapping problems of major consequence now piling up in our society and in our economy as a result of the policies unilaterally imposed by the Biden administrative state.
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.
Faith and the Arts 